The Weekly Weird - 2016-01-08
- The Website Obesity Crisis is yet another wonderful presentation by the guy who runs pinboard. Clearly, we have similar aesthetic senses re page size (the entire homepage of skorgu.net runs 169KB). Of course, as in almost all cases where smart people make inexplicably stupid decisions, the reason is that they're optimizing for something you can't see. Usually this falls into the "you are not the customer" paradigm.
- seL4 and Rust in one headline is enough to get my attention.
- This was linked in the previous "normalization of deviance" article but I wanted to call it to the front of the class since it offers actionable advice on mitigation: "The Normalization of Deviance in Healthcare Delivery".
- I rarely have the mental wherewithal to navigate those Edge recap articles so I'm highly grateful to Scott Aaronson's recap of this years'. I'm especially fond of the drawing-out of thematically-similar replies.
- Solid-state LIDAR!
- Jepsen analyzes RethinkDB. Basically nothing will get me to seriously consider using your product as efficiently as a positive Call Me Maybe result.
- Every pop-science article on hangovers annoys me, except this one. It's always astonished me how little we know about alcohol's effects; clearly it has some astonishing(ly bad) health effects in an epidemiological sense but the existing data on smaller scales is atrocious and usually confined to the ink-stained cock-fighting pit of "a glass of wine a day" garbage peddlers. Good to see some actual biochemical examination starting to happen after only 9,000 years.
- There's no way I would trust code I wrote to dose myself with insulin.
- More competition for Tesla. I admit I'm unreasonably excited about four-wheel-drive electric chassis being the norm as the popsci article implies.
- Reality resembles a bad 90s hacker film, exhibit 829: Highly destructive malware creates "destructive events" at 3 Ukrainian substations.
- I've been complaining about the price spike between 1-gigabit ethernet (~free) and 10-gigabit ethernet (~a kidney unless you get some used, no-longer-supported kit) for ages now. Fortunately, there are plans afoot to enable intermediate speeds like 2.5 and 5 gigabits over existing cabling, ironically to support faster wifi. In true "now you have two problems" fashion, there are two competing standards: MGBase-T and NBase-T.
- "High-Speed Trader DRW Proposes Thousand-Foot Plus Tower in Rural England"
- Cause of death by age. Pretty charts.
- A nice look forward at what might happen to Rust in 2016.
- "DELETE your logs. Delete your installations. Wipe everything clean, Walk out into the path of cherry blossom trees and let your motherboard feel the stones."
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Some 32C3 talks:
- A Dozen Years of Shellphish presents the (damn impressive) angr.io.
- Shopshifting, the video behind the "payment protocols suck" news item.
- Beyond your cable modem
- Rowhammer.js
- Predicting crime in a big data world
- Building and Breaking wireless security
- The plain simple reality of entropy
- APT Reports and Opsec evolution
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My Robot Will Crush You With Its Soft Delicate Hands. Let's look at this one in more detail if you don't mind.
- The actual body of the robots is silicone. Silicone itself is manufactured from silicon dioxide and methanol. SiO2 is about 5% of Martian soil and Methanol is straightforward to make out of Methane (which is itself straightforward to extract from the Martian atmosphere). All these processes are relatively energy intensive but they're all existing industrial processes with high TRL already.
- Of course even these 'soft' robots need pumps and actuators and stuff, it would be nice to not have to lug those up out of Earth's tyrranical gravity well. If only there were an easy source of metal that we could grind up and feed into a 3D printer.
- Rigid robots can lay bricks and we already know what to make bricks out of on Mars.
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"What does all the land in Manhattan cost? Tl;dr $1.4 Trillion. Actual paper (docx format).
- Remember Chernobyl? The EU has been building a new containment for it for years and it's been inexplicably poorly-documented. Finally, some good drone footage of the current state.
- Don't worry, satellite communication is totally safe. (Old but still interesting)
- A reminder that fancy derivatives probably don't do what you think they do.
- I'm not ashamed to admit that Poe's law caught me out on this one.
