2021-08-06 Nerd Roundup
Not a lot of cowboys but a plethora of nerd stories this week.
| STORY | BUT WHY? |
| Title | But why? |
| The Cryptocurrency Surveillance Provision Buried in the Infrastructure Bill is a Disaster for Digital Privacy | It's not happy news, but it's important enough that tech folks need to pay attention. The old days of hands-off legislatures are long, long gone. Now with each new year, programmers have to figure out if what they're doing is legal or not. It'll get worse. Will we see the coding equivalent of a JAG in the next decade or two? Are you a broker? Am I? If the law says everything and applies to everybody, there is no law. |
| Thymic stromal lymphopoietin induces adipose loss through sebum hypersecretion | Become a greasy slimeball while you lose half of your body fat! I don't do or believe in miracle cures for baldness, fat loss, cancer and so forth, and I hate reading about mouse studies. Still .... this is really wild. If there's some analogy in humans, it'd be huge news. We'll see. |
| Why Rudolph Hess Was the Last Casualty of WW II | Not nerds, but history. Still, it's interesting. How much do we really know about anything in history? |
| Demystifying recursive zero-knowledge proofs | This is a great 'splainer piece about RZKPs |
| Vue.js has been selected as Wikimedia Foundation's future JavaScript framework | Vue.js seems to be doing a much better, almost bang-up job of showing how to be a good framework. Compare and contrast to Angular, React, etc. Good to see it gaining more traction |
| Why Extraterrestrial Life May Not Seem Entirely Alien | This same topic with the same conclusion has been done many, many times. Lotsa cool issues here, like convergent evolution, single sample sizes, universality of physics, likelihood of biological vs machine intelligence thriving (The Great Filter), and so forth |
| Alien Dreams | related: background |
| Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist | Wow! What a great bunch of pictures! |
| 40 Years Ago, a Woman Famously Survived Being 'Frozen Solid'. Here's The Science | What the heck is going on with ex-sanguination and using the mamalian diving reflex to induce stasis? The topic percolates up a bit, dies off, then pokes up again, then nothing again. Wasn't there a ED department doing a small study of "not-dead" tech as a way to provide potentiallty hours of operating time on people who would otherwise bleed to death? That was like ten years ago or so. |
| A Learney Knowledge Tree For Artificial Intelligence | very cool, an AI learning tree! Also the platform that's being used to do the tree. |
| Google’s ‘time crystals’ could be the greatest scientific achievement of our lifetimes | Beats the living shit out of me. In a world of hyperbole, this is the ultimate, greatest, most astounding and amazing hyperbole ever! Is there something there? More to the point, is there something there that's hidden so deep in the math and science that the author does a poor job of telling us, or is it just the usual poor science reporting we've all grown to love and hate? |
| Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real | related: more depth |
| Samsung’s new DDR5 RAM chips could give single-stick capacities of up to 768GB | Frickin' A, man! I want this even if I'm never going to use it! Like four of them! |
| Bell Unveils VTOL Aircraft Concepts That All Feature Fold-Away Rotors For Jet-Speed Flight | Folding back rotors, jet (perhaps supersonic?) speed. VTOL. I love watching Osprey tech continue to evolve |
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