The Weekly Weird - 2016-04-08
- I'm a sucker for infrastructure and alcohol so a bar connected to the world's oldest subway tunnel sounds a bit like a carefully-constructed plot to ensnare me for eternity. Weekly Weird meetup anyone?
- Biological computers obviously need a compiler. Seriously, this thing apparently translates a subset of Verilog to plasmid-based biological gates (large pdf). HN comments.
- I guess some data leaked lately? First the Unaoil bribery leaks, then a database of all Turkish citizens, and now this Panama Papers one. We should probably not be surprised that spies are quite fond of offshore corporations or that offshore-managing law firms are not fond of email security.
- I really like this NYTimes visualization of the marriage tax penalty.
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VotersComputers don't make decisions, the people whocount the votesseed the RNGs make decisions. - Good job WhatsApp, encrypting is good. As noted in the article, this is based on
Axolotlthe signal protocol which is srs bsns. - I've always thought that TPMs were underused in open source so I'm gratified to see that some work is under way to incorporate them into the boot process for cloud service providers.
- The march of bad scifi tropes turning into lab prototypes continue with bulletproof metal foams.
- Everyone standing on a subway platform waiting for a train wonders at what point they should just give up. Three cheers for someone actually doing the math. Glorious.
- A roadmap to Interstellar Flight (PDF).
- Color theory is really neat. HN Comments with more.
- I find Eve to be absolutely fascinating, even absent any desire to actually play the game myself. I particularly enjoyed this article on how to report on fictional, digital warfare.
- Hydrogen is weird.
- Rust tidbits: TiDB and TiKV are aiming to make a Rust version of Spanner or CockroachDB. Neon can nicely wrap Rust code for use in Node.js apps.
- Presented without comment: A fork that simulates the flavor of salt by stimulating the tongue.