Month: December 2013

100 years of dog tinkering

Idiocracy is already here, for dogs.

The Basset Hound has gotten lower, has suffered changes to its rear leg structure, has excessive skin, vertebra problems, droopy eyes prone to entropion and ectropion and excessively large ears. No dog breed has ever been improved by the capricious and arbitrary decision that a shorter/longer/flatter/bigger/smaller/curlier “whatever” is better. Condemning a dog to a lifetime of suffering for the sake of looks is not an improvement; it is torture.

2021-11-08: Another look at extinct dog breeds:

After more than 30 ka by the side of their human companions, and the development of 100s of different types, all around the globe – for different climates, hobbies, tastes, and professions – dogs were suddenly at the mercy of shows and sporting events. “There are a number of dogs that the Victorians kind of abandoned. If dogs don’t get a following in a dog show, then they kind of disappear. Nobody breeds them, nobody buys them, nobody shows them.” The era saw a kind of mass extinction of dogs which had been in existence for ka.

Overpaying 4x for health

why isn’t life expectancy 85 in the us? we’re certainly paying as if it were.

Exquisite Libraries

stunning

Libraries encapsulate the history of knowledge and stand as monuments to different epochs in architecture, interior design and art. When Dr. James Campbell of Cambridge University could not find a book that traced the history of library buildings through the ages, he decided to write one himself. With the renowned architectural photographer Will Pryce he embarked on an epic journey across 21 countries, visiting 85 of the world’s greatest libraries. 3 years later the result is The Library: A World History, the most complete account of library buildings to date. Here James Campbell and Will Pryce take us on a virtual journey through some of their favorites.

Twin Primes Conjecture

similar excitement to andrew wiles & fermat’s last theorem from a few years ago. you can follow progress here

an obscure mathematician — one whose talents had gone so unrecognized that he had worked at a Subway restaurant to make ends meet — garnered worldwide attention and accolades from the mathematics community for settling a long-standing open question about prime numbers, those numbers divisible by only 1 and themselves. Yitang Zhang showed that even though primes get increasingly rare as you go further out along the number line, you will never stop finding pairs of primes separated by at most 70M. His finding was the first time anyone had managed to put a finite bound on the gaps between prime numbers, representing a major leap toward proving the centuries-old twin primes conjecture

France nearly invented the internet

one of the inventors of the internet lived on the wrong continent and saw his work squandered.

Yet the innovations that made CYCLADES so compelling to Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn stirred hostility within France’s PTT and other state-run telecoms providers across Europe.