Month: April 2015

Full Stack

CSS is a conspiracy

another mickens episode, on w3c. too bad they’re in pdf:

Cascading Style Sheets are a cryptic language developed by the Freemasons to obscure the visual nature of reality and encourage people to depict things using ASCII art. The relationship between CSS and HTML is the same relationship that links the instructions for building your IKEA bed, and the unassembled, spiteful wooden planks that purportedly contain latent bed structures

Firms Now 80% Dark Matter

in 40 years we’ve gone from a world where it was easy to see most of what made the biggest public firms valuable, to a world where most of that value is invisible.

Hospital alert fatigue

Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts, an average of 1 alarm beeping by the bedside every 8 minutes. For the entire month, there were 381560 alarms across the 5 ICUs. If you add the inaudible alerts, there were 2.5M unique alarms in 1 month in our ICUs, the overwhelming majority of them false

Medieval Robots

In 807 the caliph in Baghdad sent Charlemagne a gift the like of which had never been seen in the Christian empire: a brass water clock. It chimed the hours by dropping small metal balls into a bowl. Instead of a numbered dial, the clock displayed the time with 12 mechanical horsemen that popped out of small windows, rather like an Advent calendar

Host tolerance

Instead of focusing on how to kill specific pathogens, THoR seeks to catalyze the development of breakthrough interventions that would increase the ability of patients’ own bodies to tolerate a broad range of pathogens. The program will explore the fundamental biology of host tolerance in animal populations with the goal of expanding treatment options for humans in the future.

Great Attractor

Around 40 years ago, astronomers became aware that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was moving through space at a much faster rate than expected. At 2.2m kmh, the speed of the Milky Way through the cosmos is 2500x faster than a cruising airliner; 55x more than the escape velocity from Earth; and a factor of 2 greater than even the galaxy’s own escape velocity! But where this motion comes from is a mystery. Net motion can arise from nearby clumps in the distribution of matter, like a massive cluster of galaxies. The additional gravitational attraction of such a galaxy cluster can slow down, and even reverse, the expansion of the universe in its immediate vicinity. But no such cluster is obvious in the direction of the Milky Way’s motion. There is an excess of galaxies in the general vicinity, and an excess of radiation visible in X-ray telescopes. But nothing that in any way seems large enough to explain the results.