Plant tissue culture - Wikipedia

might want to do this at biohackspace

X11: How does “the” clipboard work?

Even worse than I thought. 1. Clients retain the data, so must keep a window around to 'own' the selection, but not the primary one because that may close. 2. You can specify a data type to get the data in, but there's no guarantee it'll be specifiable as MIME so good luck figuring out how to request the type you want. 3. Even though the client retains the data you can't request more than about 256k at once and everything larger must be retrieved in chunks via the X server. 3. There are two common clipboards and it is basically a matter of trying one and then the other. 4. There are also more clipboards (by convention) and in fact unlimited clipboards (the identifier is just an X atom). 5. Working around this with a clipboard manager is humourously inefficient because to re-host the clip data the manager needs to retrieve it with all its target types, and there is no way to discover which ones don't require the client to do extra work (e.g. GIMP providing 50 mime types for image data)

The skeletal system is part of the brain, too | neuroecology

This bone-based signaling is a new finding and totally and completely surprising [...] substantial computations are performed all throughout the body that affect how we think. Animals that are hungry make decisions in a fundamentally different way

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Is “information is physical” contentful?

GitHub - hansemannn/iOS11-NFC-Example: 📱 Example showing how to use the Core NFC API in iOS 11.

Looks like it may be possible to write to RFID tags using Core NFC in iOS 11. Finally!

Gaussian elimination - Wikipedia

Solve system of linear equations. Actually invented by Newton, but in fact actually invented by a Chinese person at least 1500 years before Newton wrote it up.

Exploring LSTMs

Short LSTM intro

An intro to web components with otters – Monica Dinculescu

Can't beat otters

What Really Happened with Vista – Hacker Noon

1. MS neglected important hardware trends (mobile) because they were focused on software innovation; key features of successful devices in the 2000s (battery life, connectivity) were not really about software. 2. The focus on managed code as a response to security vulnerabilities was terribly overambitious and resulted in MS dropping the ambitious parts halfway through the development cycle.

Please, enough with the dead butterflies! – Emily S. Damstra

Living butterflies don't push their wings forward like that. hn

Everything that Works Works Because it's Bayesian: Why Deep Nets Generalize?

Where Our Number Concepts Come From

via benno

Crash course to Amiga assembly programming - Reaktor.com

via HN

RFID-Zapper(EN) - 22C3

"The RFID-Zapper might [...] lead to dangerous behavior, like speaking your mind, using freedom of speech, fighting for your rights, all of which are bound to ultimately lead to the communist world revolution ;-)" (via HN)

JSON Meta Application Protocol Specification (JMAP)

Seems okay -- no really good reason for JSON apart from "you have to use something", and some disadvantages (verbose, separate protocol for attachments since they're binary), but otherwise nothing sticks out as odd.

Stop Saying the Brain Learns By Rewiring Itself - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

Not a compelling case. :( He criticises neuroscientists for not knowing the details of their own theory, but doesn't present any of his own.

Is Matter Conscious? - Issue 47: Consciousness - Nautilus

Chernoff face - Wikipedia

"Chernoff faces display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty."

Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Connected to the Hard Problem in Physics?

From my notes to M: not that convincing: Basically the argument is, as I understand it: 1. Science doesn’t tell us about “things in themselves”, but only about how they relate to other things. In other words we can accurately describe how a photon behaves, but we can’t say what exactly a photon fundamentally *is*. 2. It doesn’t make sense to have a universe of relationships between things but no actual things. 3. Consciousness is a way of describing things-in-themselves (the concept of “something being red” for example, which is something you understand as a thing even if you can’t really describe it) 4. So we posit that this set of things-in-themselves is the actual structure of the universe (the hardware) and everything we do is just describing interactions between those things (the software).

Consciousness is an Inevitable State of Matter – Evan Warfel – Medium

This claims to talk about consciousness, but actually ends up making the argument that to efficiently and dynamically make predictions one needs a) a rich variety of input categorisations and b) a locus of attention, neither of which require consciousness.

What is this colored fiber in my chicken? | Hacker News

Disgusting.

Death Burger

DEATH HERALD DEATH BURGER DETH It's drawings

Attack of the Killer Microseconds

GitHub - maralla/completor.vim: Async completion framework made ease

code completion for vim

http://wick.works/crescentloom-ks-postmortem/

Watch "Primary - Nitrous Oxide" on YouTube

Selfie: tiny self-compiling C compiler, MIPS emulator and MIPS hypervisor

Emscripten/HTML integration tips

Hn

Rookie » DIY Finger-Knitted Scarf

the other week I learnt that you can finger knit with more than one finger

GitHub - haypo/hachoir3: Hachoir is a Python library to view and edit a binary stream field by field

Came up on HN in the discussion about the SHA-1 collision

ASLR on the Line: Practical Cache Attacks on the MMU [pdf]

Very cool description of timing attack on cached page table entries.

http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/archive/index610.html

The mysteries of time itself!!!!

Sumptuous Sumptuary Laws | In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress

Edward III's 1336 law limiting all his subjects (not just the poor!) to only two courses: "two sorts of victuals at the utmost, be it of Flesh or Fish, with the common sorts of pottage, without sawce". For their own good of course: "through the excessive and overmany sorts of costly Meats[...] many mischiefs have happened"

Rosalie's Medieval Woman - Sumptuary Laws

1363: Carters, ploughmen, drivers of ploughs, oxherds, cowherds, swineherds, dairymaids and everyone else working on the land who does not have 40 shillings of goods: no cloth except blanket and russet at 12d per ell, belts of linen (rope).

Mathematical universe hypothesis - Wikipedia

Max Tegmark, with a Schmidhuber cameo

PIMETA v2 Headphone Amplifier

Ant Simulator canceled after crowdfunding money spent on liquor and strippers | GamesBeat | Games | by Dean Takahashi

"The sound of dirt crumbling echos through the underground tunnels. Your tiny mandibles loosen debris from the walls. "

How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

Zipf’s Law Arises Naturally When There Are Underlying, Unobserved Variables

Really interesting proposal that Zipf's distribution arises so frequently because latent variables with narrow energy distributions, when combined, give a distribution with wide energy distribution, which is necessary and sufficient for a Zipfian distribution. Example: Zipf on word distributions can be explained by the distribution of parts of speech (where the word frequency within parts of speech is not Zipfian, i.e. has narrow energy distribution).

Woolf's Reading of Joyce's Ulysses, 1922-1941 - Modernism Lab Essays

"Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th--merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts."

Clozure CL

CL being "common Lisp". This is not Clojure. (hn)

Brain Computation Is Organized via Power-Of-Two-Based Permutation Logic [pdf]

The limitations of Android N Encryption – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

Interesting article on something I didn't know anything about: full-disk encryption isn't suitable for phones because they're on all the time (meaning the keys are always in memory). Instead you want file-based encryption and per-file control, so that you can throw away the keys to most stuff when the device is locked, but still retain access to files which must be accessible at all times. Android 7 has made a small move in this direction, but it sucks, whereas Apple has been doing it better for the last five years.

Depressing Finland, Some cheery Finnish Christmas charols!

lol depressingfinland.tumblr.com

BashPitfalls - Greg's Wiki

Bash (and all shells except possibly fish) is fucking terrible. The whole in-band signalling concept that shells are built on is a nightmare. When abominations like 'cd -P -- "$(dirname -- "$f")"' are the correct way to do basic stuff like "cd to the file's directory" we should just give the whole thing up and go back to meaningful column positions. I defy anyone who has not read "bash pitfalls" to come up with that cd line by themselves (including Stephen Bourne). And the whole page is full of those. Some of them are for exotic things (filenames starting with -, or containing newlines) but in 2016 it's routine to find new shell scripts and Makefiles which don't even deal with spaces, and the reason is that nobody banging out a quick shell script has the time to read through "bash pitfalls" to ensure they're doing it right. More like "bash pits of despair". Burn it all.

Enzymes from nine organisms combined to create new pathway to use CO2

A list of headless web browsers

I. J. Good - Wikipedia

Worked with Turing; apparently the originator of Good-Turing smoothing (if Wikipedia is correct, Turing's contribution was merely to observe that the non-smoothed model wasn't very good -- Good then came up with the smoothing method).

Is This What Quantum Mechanics Looks Like? : videos

interesting demonstration of, and discussion surrounding, the pilot wave interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Grenouille Bouillie: The dawn of 3D games...

Interesting discussion of microoptimisations for 3d graphics on 68000-based computers such as Amiga and ST. But I note no mention of the blitter...