The Weekly Weird - 2015-11-13
"Winning at life is all about who can exploit externalities the hardest" -- a wise man
- An excellent overview of the new graph isomorphism result.
- From the this-timeline-is-the-strangest-timeline department: if Satoshi Nakamoto wins the Nobel Prize in Economics, they'll just transfer the $M to 1HLoD9E4SDFFPDiYfNYnkBLQ85Y51J3Zb1.
- Superconductors are one of those technologies (like fusion or P=NP) that would reshape the world in about an hour and a half singlehandedly. There was some noise about -70° superconductivity a while ago which has now been peer-reveiwed and published in Nature. It's still under (hilariously) high pressure and H2S isn't a fun material to work with but -70 is achievable with normal lab equipment (I'm told). More excitingly, it's surprising and from surprised scientists come breakthroughs.
- Hackers! Insider trading! Yawn.
- I always enjoy watching the legal system deal with big changes in society. For example, there's about to be a (US) property rights regime for asteroid mining.
- Having just fiddled with Docker I'm convinced that the ergonomics of it are beneficial. The performance story is complicated, especially considering the diversity of networking models supported. Here's RedHat's opinion.
- It's a lifetime career goal of mine to never write a line of Java. Mind you, Java is approximately as old as Home Alone and Lisp is approximately as old as the Vietnam War. (h/t jetpack)
- SPEAKING OF JETPACKS. Now to be clear, I'd kill myself 8 seconds into using one but man are they cool. I can almost imagine a world in which the autopilot is strict enough (but not too strict) that these are safe enough to use. I can much more easily imagine a world in which this kind of power to weight makes VTOL cat litter delivery drones feasible.
- While we're on the subject of getting up close and personal with the results of exothermic reaction, it would be remiss of me to have never linked to Ignition, a delightful 1972 book on the development of rocket fuels.
- NASA mission posters are a trove of nerdy glory.
- House Iter
- First rule of secret data: Don't broadcast it on TV. (Alternatively, suuure guys, that was totally secret)
- Detroit is getting 10gbit (apparently not a typo) home internet access. There are surely more factors than fat pipes and cheap land but I wouldn't be surprised to see remote workers (and maybe eventually startups) looking in that direction.
