jcl

It’s true that the problem of generating the exact same image seems to be a single-threaded problem. But I suppose the general problem of rendering an approximation of a strange attractor could be parallelized by generating images from several different starting positions and combining them.

I was impressed by the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, accidentally had a gunpowder tamping iron blasted through his head. A doctor was somehow able to treat the wound, such that he was able to make a near-complete recovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

The “relicensing” file, found higher in the directory tree, expresses Fabrice Bellard’s intent to relicense his tcc contributions under an MIT-style license. So that file is available for use under multiple licenses, even if it only explicitly mentions the GPL in the comments.

https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine/blob/master/Che...

Training with the n-back task (a memory game) has been shown in some studies to improve performance in other cognitive tasks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back#Treatment

Wow... that's scary. But I think that when the article talks about water being "rotated", it's talking about individual water atoms, whose rotation would be too small to see.

I imagine that the waviness would actually be due to the change in refraction due to the microwave's uneven heating -- like the waviness seen in the air just above a hot road, or the faint ripples seen at the bottom of a pot of cold water, when you start to heat it on a stove.

I imagine you could, and that it might not even be that exciting...

Since a Klein bottle is just a cylinder with its ends glued together a particular way, I think one way to sweep out a Klein bottle through time would be to have a rubber band split into two, then have each band travel along a trajectory that brings them back together with the correct orientation. The self intersection is easily avoided by having one of the bands travel faster than the other.

I love that the “hand-blown” bottle pictured in the article is one of Cliff Stoll’s.

Per the article’s side bar, the astronaut was working through “How to Design Programs”, a book by several of the Racket contributors, including the article’s author, Shriram Krishnamurthi. As far as teaching languages go, scheme does have the advantage of having almost no punctuation to mess up. And DrRacket is a wonderfully beginner-friendly environment.

I guess Hacker News might qualify as a real-world use of scheme/homoiconicity? I believe it runs on Arc, which runs on Racket. https://github.com/wting/hackernews

Also note that the author has made the whole book available to read free online and via ebook:

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Surprisingly, your visual perception of something can actually be affected by how big you think its image is, even if it is not live.

The "vertical-horizontal illusion" is an optical illusion where a vertical line appears to be longer than a horizontal line of the same length. It turns out that this illusion is more pronounced in larger images, even if the image has the same content. In fact, some researchers used monocular VR to show that your perception of horizontal vs. vertical scale can be altered just by making you believe that the image you are viewing is scaled to a TV vs. a movie theater screen -- even when you are constrained to view exactly the same pixels in both cases.

I have a pet theory that this may be why film stars thought that TV cameras "added ten pounds"... Viewing a face at smaller-than-life size could make you perceive it as a little more squat than it really is.

(I learned this from a talk by Dennis Proffitt... might be from this paywalled article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p3053 )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical%E2%80%93horizontal_il...

Thedailywtf stories are generally some mix of fiction and fact. They take a presumably first-hand account from an insider and change a bunch of details to anonymize it and enhance it for dramatic effect.

I'd guess, for this particular story, that at least the misparsing of XML for a futures contract actually happened, and maybe that some producer consequently had to ask about the feasibility of delivering to a corporate office that happened to be in former docklands. It's entirely possible that the commodity involved was not coal, and it's extremely unlikely that a guy showed up one day at the front desk with a clipboard and barges outside.

In response to skepticism in the comments, the article's author gives an example of a futures contract on eggs where delivery was accidentally taken: https://web.archive.org/web/20090925022603/http://www.minyan...

I've always been particularly impressed by the way Mort Drucker drew hands -- so expressive and seemingly effortless, sometimes carrying the scene as much as the faces.

A good summary: http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2006/03/wowee-look-at-th...

Love the song and video -- great to see the behind-the-scenes and in-jokes.

One thing I'm still curious about is the lyric: "You should never / write words using numbers / unless you're seven / or your name is Prince" -- particularly, whether it was an intentional reference to the movie "Se7en". If it was, it seems like a missed opportunity in the video.

Reminds me of the barely visible yellow tracking dots that some color inkjets produce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

Judging from SIGGRAPH videos/presentations, it's pretty common for graphics researchers who are non-native speakers to use text-to-speech or a native-speaking acquaintance for narration. I think it's done explicitly to help comprehension, although I think self-consciousness or fear of public speaking plays a role, too.

Correct... the article does not explicitly mention the 20-second recommendation, which was presumably arrived at by experimentation. But it does explain why such a time-based recommendation might work:

> The skin is quite rough and wrinkly which is why you do need a fair amount of rubbing and soaking to ensure the soap reaches very crook and nanny on the skin surface that could be hiding active viruses.

It's funny how often that happens. A favorite example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_pounds_(British_coin)#Desi...

Similar to that AT&T campaign, I was struck by the prescience of Qwest's "Ride the Light" commercials: "All rooms have every movie ever made, in any language, anytime, day or night." This was in 1999, when Netflix had barely started mailing DVDs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRX4s8C9518&t=38

FWIW, it looks like that's a test case -- it is not part of Chrome itself. They most likely just wanted an example of a third-party website, and could have used any non-Google site there.

Many man pages have examples, but they consistently bury them at the end, after exhaustively covering every flag, file, or environment variable that could possibly affect execution.

It might not be crazy to move the examples section to the top, since it would more quickly provide what most readers are looking for: a sample command line to tweak. Anyone who is genuinely looking for what a particular flag does is just going to search for it anyway, so it doesn't really matter if that flag appears on the 24th screen instead of the 23rd.

I was surprised to learn that the Four Yorkshiremen sketch actually predates Monty Python -- I guess this is why they only did renditions in their live shows. Of the original Four, only Cleese and Chapman went on to be Pythons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Yorkshiremen_sketch

Why limit yourself to programmable semicolons? I hear C++ is going to have programmable whitespace: http://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

(For anyone unaware, in this context "ice" most likely refers to "internal combustion engine" vehicles.)

> It seems that wedding photographers keep the copyright so that they can reproduce them for self-promotion and advertising

That's probably not the main reason, since many other artists are able to use their work-for-hire in self promotion. All they'd need is an appropriate usage license, not copyright ownership.

More likely, when wedding photographers try to keep the copyright, they are hoping to charge separately for additional prints or DVDs, control which print shop reproduces their work, enforce the presence of their watermarks, or relicense the images as stock photography. These are all additional revenue and advertising streams that would not be available if the customer held the copyright.

Reminds me of a curiosity seen during a tour of the historic Filoli mansion: An appliance that cooks food by running mains power through it. Apparently someone in the early 20th century thought this was a good idea. I don't remember the exact food it was used for -- maybe hotdogs, or bacon?

(Seen here, on the counter:) https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a0/f7/35/a0f7352484c9426ea188...

I've read, though, that one downside of Serde is that it tends to generate large binaries -- the cost of performance, I guess.

https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/2019/08/21/rust-bloat.html#...

Something I found surprising: Some AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions consume so much power that Intel chose to have their chips dynamically slow their clock frequency when the instructions are executed. So naively switching to SIMD instructions can not only fail to improve performance, but it can also hurt the performance of unaltered code executed after it -- even unrelated code running on other cores.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen...

Looks like the second vsprintf definition should be "BANNED(vsprintf)", not "BANNED(sprintf)". Not that it matters much, as it only affects the error message.

> You don't have gas or grocery insurance, do you?

Some people do have analogous "insurance" for gas or groceries: Anyone with a Sam's Club, Costco, or Amazon Prime membership pays a subscription fee so that they can get a negotiated discount on routine, affordable expenses.

So, yeah, I guess most "health insurance" could be more accurately called "healthcare buyer's clubs (that also happen to include some insurance)". Unfortunately, we're in the late stages of an economy where the buyer's clubs have eaten the entire market and are free to extract fat margins with little consequence.

The article's description of his process was a little hard to follow. A time lapse was much clearer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKFgLQVX86U