How to survive if you're in a car that's hanging off a cliff
Drive slow, homie.
There's iron atoms in that thar Earth's inner core
‘Our advanced calculations show that iron atoms display collective motion with fast diffusion in the premelting regime, leading to the ultralow shear modulus and ultrahigh Poisson’s ratio.’
Hippos are horrible at chewing, and their giant tusks and front teeth are to blame, according to a PLOS ONE paper from 4th October. To be honest, I’m not surprised as watching them chew food on Instagram made my mouth hurt.
Rest of World on the world’s last internet cafes
‘As long as ownership of personal computers is low, then we will still be doing some business. There is so much one cannot do on the phone conveniently,’
Science media on the super blue moon from last month
True blue, baby I love moon!
Text classification using... gzip??
Why waste time class lot word when gzip do trick?
Matt Parker looks at the maths behind needing just 27 lottery tickets to guarantee a win
I like those odds!
Happy birthday to Marjorie Lee Browne who was born on this day in 1914. Her work on linear algebra, topology, and the properties of classical groups and being the first Black women to earn a PhD in mathematics from a US university makes her a champion Blerd (↬ Bluesky)
Ernie Smith on dead hardware
Imagine thinking a hand crank for a laptop would be a good idea!
Jess Peck on the dangers of AI optimism
‘It’s not the atom bomb: it’s leaded fuel. It won’t end the world in a bang, or in a climactic fight of good humans and foul machines, but in a gasp.’
TextFX, Google’s latest AI project using PaLM 2, looks interesting on the surface but no rapper using this would ever be taken seriously (by serious people). I also don’t know (yet) whether any OpenAI models could offer something similar out of the box (conditions apply).
Joshua Stein got WiFi into his Macintosh Portable. A remarkable feat!