Sapere Aude
Month: November 2018
6 Ruined British Castles Come Back to Life
Onward and NoeMam Studios have joined forces to digitally reconstruct 6 ruined castles across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The series of gifs sees the castles fluidly re-emerge from the landscape, retelling the sense of place by showing “the true splendor enjoyed and defended by yesteryear’s barons, queens, and kings.
Researchers have discovered a new kind of organism that doesn’t fit into the plant, animal, or any other kingdom of known organisms. 2 species of the microscopic organisms, called hemimastigotes, were found in dirt. Hemimastigotes were first seen and described in the 19th century, and ~10 species have been described over the past 100 years. But up to now, no one could figure out how they fit into the evolutionary tree of life. Based on the new genetic analysis, it looks like you’d have to go back 1 ga before you could find a common ancestor of hemimastigotes and any other known living thing.
The geno-economists seem confident that human genes have a measurable influence on human outcomes. But publicizing whatever predictive power does lie in our genes runs the risk of misleading the rest of us into believing that control of our genes is control of our future. They’re adamant that their motives are in forestalling the dystopian implications of the work, in fighting off misinformation and misguided policies. “The world in which we can predict all sorts of things about the future based on saliva samples — personality traits, cognitive abilities, life outcomes — is happening in the next 5 years. Now is the time to prepare for that.”
Be sure to ask for the coffee shop menu, available all day and labeled “Lunch,” otherwise you’ll just be handed a single menu featuring stir fries and relatively pricey seafood. On the more robust coffee shop menu, find the glorious staples of the cuisine in its commonest form: wonton soups, over-rice dishes at bargain prices, congee, and (only available until 13:00 or so when it runs out) rice noodle rolls. The wonton soup features thin-skinned wrinkly dumplings, bulging with a combination of pork and shrimp. Have the soup with noodles and duck, and enjoy the best bowl of wonton soup in the city, the broth stronger than usual to readily flavor the massed components in the bowl.
this stole some plot lines from the young pope
When he retired, the ultra-conservative Pope Benedict XVI was expected to disappear from view, clearing the way for his liberal successor, Francis, to clean house in the notoriously corrupt Vatican. Instead, he stayed, setting the stage for a de-stabilizing brawl over morality, theology, and the Church’s horrific legacy of sexual abuse.
The Pentagon has suddenly started uploading malware samples from APTs and other nation-state sources to the website VirusTotal, which is essentially a malware zoo that’s used by security pros and antivirus/malware detection engines to gain a better understanding of the threat landscape. This feels like an example of the US’s new strategy of actively harassing foreign government actors. By making their malware public, the US is forcing them to continually find and use new vulnerabilities.
Bands buying Facebook likes is nothing new. The (very silly) practice has been going on for as long as Facebook pages have existed, businesses and bands alike using bots to up their stats in the hopes of improving their social media standing. One LA band, who go by the name of Threatin, appear to have taken this mantra to its most baffling extreme. “At the time, we all felt a little bit stunned with the whole situation as it all unfolded. We didn’t really know what to think as we waited to hear if the venue would close or the show would go ahead. I believed, from what I had heard that evening, that it was the promoter who had duped Threatin and I did feel sorry for him (hence why we watched his set). It wasn’t until the hours and days after that I realized everything about his online presence is a lie and that he probably knew about everything beforehand – even before booking the tour. I feel angry that acts like this exist – who buy likes, comments and YouTube plays and then book reputable venues and lie about ticket sales. It damages the music scene and venues end up out of pocket because of an empty room. It also makes it harder for genuine bands like mine, who work hard, to gain live exposure due to the fact that no tickets were actually sold. We ended up out of pocket due to expenses, van hire etc. as we expected to sell merch at the show. It doesn’t put us off playing live, the owners of the Exchange were amazing throughout – just like many of the venues across the country. You learn from these experiences and we’ll just be more wary in future.”
If you were around pre-1900s, and wanted to contribute to biology, you should have been a physicist (Robert Hooke, a physicist discovers the first cell, making a better microscope is a major driver of progress). In which field should you work to maximize progress in biology today? …But something interesting happened around the 1950s. If you look at the most important techniques in biology, in the second half of the 1900s, they’re all driven by tools discovered in biology itself. Biologists aren’t just finding new things – they’re making their new tools from biological reagents. PCR (everything that drives PCR, apart from the heater/cooler which is 1600s thermodynamics, is either itself DNA or something made by DNA), DNA sequencing (sequencing by synthesis – we use cameras/electrical detection/CMOS chips as the output, but the hijacking the way the cell makes DNA proteins remains at the heart of the technique), cloning (we cut up DNA with proteins made from DNA, stick the DNA into bacteria so living organisms can make more copies of it for us), gene editing (CRISPR is obviously made from DNA and with RNA attached), ELISA (need the ability to detect fluorescence – optics – and process the signal, but antibodies lie at the heart of this principle), affinity chromatography (liquid chromatography arguably uses physical principles like steric hindrance, or charge, but those can be traced back to the 1800s – antibodies and cloning have revolutionized this technique), FACS uses the same charge principles that western blots do, but with the addition of antibodies…
It’s an extraordinarily demanding branch of study: the Library included documents in at least 17 languages and 24 scripts, many of which have been extinct for centuries or known only from a few examples. The collection mirrors the remarkable diversity of Dunhuang itself, where Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Manicheans, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews, and Chinese scribes copied Tibetan prayers that had been translated from Sanskrit by Indian monks working for Turkish khans. Given how international the materials from Dunhuang are, scholars have agreed that the methods for their study should be, too. For decades, however, they have faced real problems, both in conducting research and in sharing their findings; Stein and the explorers who followed him scattered the library’s holdings among more than 12 libraries and museums around the world.
COWEN: So you receive an offer to run Google. Why were you so skeptical about Google at first?
SCHMIDT: Well, I assumed that search wasn’t very important, and I assumed the ads didn’t work. I was so concerned about the ads that, after I accepted the offer — because it just seemed like it was interesting, and a lot of luck comes from doing things that are interesting, and sort of creating your own luck — I hauled the then–sales executive, whose name was Tim Armstrong, who you all know well, and I said, “Tim, prove to me that these ads work.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 