Month: September 2016

Human Pigments

see also, human skin used for book bindings.

Eugene Delacroix’s most famous painting, “Liberty Leading the People,” hangs in a revered spot in Paris’ Louvre Museum. Inspired by the 1830 Paris Uprising, it has been held up as an embodiment of the French national ethos, and most recently as a justification for the country’s controversial burkini ban.

But “Liberty Leading the People” may also have been literally painted with people.

From at least the 16th century until as late as the early 1900s, a pigment made from mummified human remains appeared on the palettes of European artists, including Delacroix. Painters prized “mummy brown” for its rich, transparent shade. As a result, an unknown number of ancient Egyptians are spending their afterlife on art canvases, unwittingly admired in museum galleries around the world.

Knome

we’re now in the age where kickstarters for $1k genome reads are a thing.

Draken Harald Hårfagre

for the first time in 1000 years, a viking ship has crossed the atlantic, (and then made it’s way down to nyc):

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOsJGGh0wV-rvB0r9E8WqT3UXc7ERaTHdUDLPfYZgnUormsn-xaDtbbuSsivYqXqw?key=Z1JiSG5DX1RFbW9QVmt3RlEwaWlvVmxZNWtpTmlB

Fermi Explainer

nice fermi’s paradox blurb

A New Terror-Alert System

Just before 8 on Monday morning, New Yorkers got a message on their mobile phones: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.” The news came through the same emergency-alert system, with its disorienting buzz, that government agencies use to send news of a flood, and so it suggested some uncanny Pynchonian transference, in which terrorism had become as mundane and as universally affecting as the atmosphere. By 11:30, the alert had made a “significant contribution,” as Mayor Bill de Blasio put it at a lunchtime news conference, to the capture of Rahami, who was found sleeping in the doorway of a bar in his home town of Linden, New Jersey. The alert had an “extraordinary effect.” His new police commissioner, James O’Neill, called it the “future.”

in reality, the message was incredibly dumb & vague, due to unreasonable implementation of this system. plain text, no photos. we can do way better.

Internet Justice League

the software is designed to use machine learning to automatically spot the language of abuse and harassment

if you applied this to twitter, you’d be left with 1% of the current “volume”

Thieves disable bomb

The day Ahmad Khan Rahami planted 2 bombs in Chelsea, 2 thieves accidentally helped to disable his second pressure cooker bomb left inside a rolling suitcase on West 27th Street

BBR

This commit implements a new TCP congestion control algorithm: BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT). A detailed description of BBR will be published in ACM Queue, Vol. 14 No. 5, September-October 2016, as “BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control”. BBR has significantly increased throughput and reduced latency for connections on Google’s internal backbone networks and google.com and YouTube Web servers.

the biggest advance for tcp since congestion control was added.

Billion star Atlas

That’s 400m new stars. This map covers 1% of the milky way with an estimated 100B stars

An advanced mapmaker has produced the most accurate map of the Milky Way to date—including nearly 400K never-before-seen stars.

Taos County

The mesa lacked almost every incentive for a permanent population. The one resource it had was cheap land tucked far away from neighbors, cops, building inspectors, and anyone else who might stop a person from doing whatever the hell he wanted on his very own scrap of dirt. Even among the recluses, word was eventually going to get out. Fugitives came to live in hiding. Veterans and retirees came to stretch a monthly check. The hippie communes that had taken root in Taos County in the ‘60s and ‘70s disbanded, and a few diehards decided that isolation on the mesa was the next best thing. Environmentalists came to build the experimental Earthship homes that would have been banned by county building codes. Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts came to grow marijuana. Many came to build a life that didn’t revolve around a steady job and a mortgage payment. Others came simply to retreat into themselves. Today, Taos County is one of the poorer counties in the country. Some do better, some do worse, but the gradation on the mesa, as in much of Taos County and New Mexico at large, is in terms of who has more of not very much. The only common culture, Elliot feels, is one of poverty.

it is amazing to find this level of anarchy in the continental us