The Weekly Weird - 2015-10-23
- Justin Bieber and Skrillex are releasing a single. No, I'm not joking. It's called "sorry".
- You might know that I have a strict "no gifts" rule. I have enough stuff and if I want more stuff I will buy it. That said, I will make an exception for radioactive gift items.
- USB powered narwhal slippers. What a world.
- Suckers, I've been sabotaging my employers from the inside for /years/
- I want to be clear, there is not a Dyson sphere around KIC 8462852. This does, however, seem like a good time to figure out what that would look like.
- The Kolmogorov Music video from last week was from Strange Loop
- I've been trying to implement some techniques for fast page loads here at skorgu.net, to little avail. I think I'm going to give up and just rewrite the whole thing to generate amp pages
- "antimatter-powered cubesat" is just a delightful phrase. The article and video do a really poor job of explaining how it actually works so here's some background: they have a way of turning a low-level radioactive decay into a small but useful amount of antimatter. They direct those positrons to a deuterium/tritium target (I think) which catalyzes fusion and releases a metrick fuckload of charged particles all flying away at a good chunk of c. You magnetically confine those charged particles out the back end and bam, thanks to the velocity component of the rocket equation you've got a profoundly stupid amount of Δv. How you build a freaking fusion reactor on a cubesat is left as an exercise to the reader but maybe having antiprotons next door is enough?
- Ok, this is beyond evil
- It looks like we can all actually agree on what a kilogram actually is now!
- I love hearing the reasons why driverless cars will never work, why they won't make drivers unemployed, etc. I especially love the flushing sound as they fly by (sign-in required, vox recap).
- Distributed Systems are hard.
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Security Roundup:
- Incorporates convene before / the Boston Raiders dinosaur.
- sed -i /dev/google 's/Open/Boring/g'
- When the NSA came out swinging advising everyone to look at quantum-resistant algorithms, a lot of people started to wonder what that implied.
- Don't worry about encryption, just let your hard drive do the crypto for you. Or, you know, don't.
- I don't know about you but I'm really glad all my credit cards have little chips in them, I'm sure that makes them more secure.
- I haven't looked at the details of their specific implementation but yay for more dnssec adoption.
- /me greps for 512 bit RSA keys, spins up EC2 instances.
- People make fun of my old-fashioned workout tracking system of a notebook and pen. At least it's not going to root my laptop one day.