Why Do Dogs Look So Sad? - The Atlantic

"A paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans." This is quite terrifying.

occam-pi and KRoC: blending CSP and the pi-calculus

Stuff to read about CSP.

Developing Brains Fold Like Crumpled Paper to Get Their Convolutions - Scientific American

Brains fold like paper folds. More surface area = more folding. Thicker cortex = less folding. Gyri from in densely-interconnected regions. Sulci form between less-well-connected regions.

Research on the cerebellum yields rewards | Hacker News

Setup LAN/WLAN Bridge with OpenWrt (LuCI) (updated) - Nerd Quickies

Loath as I am to bookmark a site called "nerd quickies", this worked as a transparent bridge, except for the firewall part which I had to do by manually editing /etc/config/firewall.

HowTos/EncryptedFilesystem - CentOS Wiki

Also supports encrypted disk images (though not sparsely).

Guide to the London Startup Ecosystem | Hacker News

#892841 - Opening a file with O_CREAT fails - Debian Bug report logs

smbnetfs patch -- this has been around for years but only just went in and isn't in debian

Dash by Plotly - Plotly

Web graphs

Johari window - Wikipedia

The Johari window is a technique[1] that helps people better understand their relationship with themselves and others.

Myths about postdocs

Deconstructed Pavlova - A Perfect Pantry

The ultimate makeover: French onion soup recipe | BBC Good Food

Delicious vego onion soup recipe.

rr: lightweight recording & deterministic debugging

full recording allows executing backwards (hn)

Lasagne with spinach and ricotta Recipe | Better Homes and Gardens

For when the supermarket doesn’t have cannelloni tubes, which is too often.

System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub & job server

Good example of how an ORM implicitly limits design choices: in Django I don’t think it would be obvious to even consider this option, because the relevant SQL requires bypassing the ORM.

HyperDia | Timetable and Route Search in Japan.

Japanese train route finder.

www.canningtonwalledgardens.co.uk

Basic Biscuit Recipe - Real Recipes from Mums

Four-ingredient biscuits. Thanks, mums.

This Japanese Toaster Costs $270. It Only Makes One Slice at a Time - Bloomberg

Amazing Japanese toaster via Bryn: the Bread Oven. “We wanted to focus on the single slice, and treat it with respect” 

An ethology reading list | neuroecology

Looking to animal behaviour to learn more about neuroscience. (Also explains the slightly odd title of the blog.)

Health Star Rating - Guide for Industry

Australian foods sometimes have a rating out of five stars on the front. The way this works is you give it points for total energy, fat, and sodium, then you subtract "redeeming feature" points for protein, fibre, and percentage of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. You then convert that raw score into a star rating, with the higher the score the fewer the stars. The rating was created in collaboration with, and applied by, industry, and it really shows. For example, the rating system is supposed to allow shoppers to compare products across a category, but dairy and non-dairy beverages are in separate categories. That presumably benefits the beverage industry. But for someone looking for a drink, that doesn't make much sense. Also, weird things like: you can't subtract protein points if your baseline points are over 13, unless you have at least 5 fibre points. So if you've got a horrible product you can stuff fibre into it to add stars, and if you manage to get enough fibre in there you can put protein in as well to add even more stars.

Pebble howtos

Pebble Time Round battery replacement, among other things.

debian - systemd attempts to mount davfs2 too early - before DHCP address received - Server Fault

Most of the internet: add _netdev to your mounts so that it will come up when the network comes up. Reality: the mount is tried when an interface is enabled but before it has been assigned an IP (if those two things are distinct, e.g. DHCP). Also "network comes up" isn't a thing in modern Linux and what apparently happens is that the mount is tried every time an iface comes up until it works.

Common degu - Wikipedia

A small Chilean rodent. "As a pet, the animal is larger than a golden hamster but smaller than a fancy rat."

Poems | Judith Crispin

Australian poet

xeno-canto :: Sharing bird sounds from around the world

historicalsource (Historical Source) / Repositories · GitHub

Infocom game source. Interesting to see the .zil.

Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index

Google Code Search: 1. create inverted index of trigraphs. 2. Use a regex engine to split the regex query in terms of trigraphs. 3. Farm the inverted index out over "some" machines.

Accelerated Ray Tracing in One Weekend in CUDA | NVIDIA Developer Blog

Even more ray tracing

In One Weekend

More ray tracing

www.sciencedaily.com

Ancient dna integrated virus seems to manipulate behaviour

DBMS Musings: NewSQL database systems are failing to guarantee consistency, and I blame Spanner

This is pretty funny. Distributed database researchers: "It's impossible to guarantee that all systems will have exactly the same time, so we should use a consistency protocol that imposes a logical ordering on top of incoming transactions". Google: "We've got unlimited resources, let's set hard limits on the maximum time skew we could have and work from there". Everyone else: "We have pretty much no resources, but NTP is a thing, right? And if Google does it..." It also makes a really good point about the CAP theorem, which is that consistency is absolute, partitions are always a possibility... but availability is *never* 100%, so you can never sacrifice consistency for availability, but rather sacrifice consistency for (perhaps marginally) *more* availability.

Evidentiality - Wikipedia

From tvtropes on Sapir-Whorf tropes: most instances of this trope implicitly equate languages with their words, which is a failure to understand even basic linguistics. Linguists see languages as grammars [...] People consciously invent new words or adopt foreign ones all the time [... but] rarely consciously invent new grammatical tenses for their language, much less invent new obligatory grammatical rules for things like evidentiality.

truepeacein.space | Metroid Password Generator

List of Metroid passwords | Wikitroid | FANDOM powered by Wikia

MOTHER BRAIN? FUCKIN TOASST

Hammerspoon

Script lots of Mac things with Lua. Based on Mjolnir, hence the silly name? I wish I were motivated enough to hack my environment up this much.

DCSS Guide - UV4

This would be a great Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup guide, except that I will never play DCSS again, because I hate it. It's the worst game ever and ridiculously unfair and frustrating and I will never open it again despite the fun times I've had in the past with my draconian axe-wielding fire elementalist

Storyblocks Portfolio | ylivdesign

Icon designer

The Portopia Serial Murder Case - Wikipedia

"The culprit is Yasu"

Giant flywheel to the rescue!

Eloston/ungoogled-chromium: Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration and enhancing privacy, control, and transparency

Version of Chromium I'm now using.

PonyORM - Python ORM with beautiful query syntax

I'm slowly moving towards not hating ORMs. I haven't tried this one, but it's used by supysonic and seems to be working very well.

OAuth and REST in Android: Part 1 - Simple Programmer

This was very helpful, even though leeloo has now become an apache project called Amber

Viennese whirls recipe | BBC Good Food

This biscuit recipe is great, but ridiculously fatty!

Docker Cleanup Commands | Calazan.com

bloody docker

How to Secure Postfix Using Let's Encrypt - UpCloud

because I'll need this in a few months when the LE cert expires

SQLite: File Content

"in place of a legal notice, here is a blessing" -- this paragraph sums up everything I find simultaneously delightful and exasperating about open source.

(A Bit of) Biological Neural Networks - Part I, Spiking Neurons

Procedural palettes

Great article on generating interesting palettes in a few bytes.