DSN Now

Deep Space Network dishes: what they're currently doing

Nuptial flight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"In October 2009, a swarm of flying ants briefly disrupted play between innings at cricket matches during the ICC Champions trophy, in South Africa."

Caryl Churchill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Robyn's recommended playwright

Ophiocoma wendtii - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In addition to functioning as an armor and giving structural support, the [calcite] crystals [on its arms] make up its unique visual systems. They minimize spherical aberration and can detect the direction of incoming light. The lenses work by filtering and focusing light on an underlying photoreceptor system. Nerve bundles under each lens, presumed to be light-sensitive, transmit the optical information to the rest of the nervous system.

The Sixth Sense You Didn't Know You Had - The Crux

How to see polarisation

Legendary Viking Sunstone Navigation: Solved : Discovery News

Super cool: humans can detect the direction of polarised light, but the effect is filtered out normally.

How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference? | Psychology Today

Fascinating -- I didn't know that female brains were composed of distinct cells, some with mother's X and some with father's X

An Education Centre for Sustainable Living - Monkton Wyld Court

recommendation from colette

My DIY Underlit LED (Hikaru) Skirt - Album on Imgur

"Compared to China the female Maker scene in the West seems incredibly conservative and hostile to women who don't conform to the blue hair and tattoos, zero-risk-non-conformist look:-) Eccentric clothing and body-modification is ok- but only if it's the same kind they have. Because if we look sexy the evil men will never take us seriously LOL." Really interesting comment -- wonder if it says something about attitudes to women in China vs the west, or if it says more about this woman's personal attitude.

Simple guided fuzzing for libraries using LLVM's new libFuzzer

Fuzzer as part of the llvm project

Writing a Mac OSX USB Device Driver That Implements SCSI Pass-through - Tenerife Skunkworks

Apple very annoyingly doesn't let you send vendor-specific SCSI commands to any mass storage device from user space. You have to write a kernel driver. Laaaaaame! Linux lets you do what you like.

Groyne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"All of a groyne may be under water, in which case it is a submerged groyne."

> But because our mosquito is oh-so-light, the raindrop moves on, unimpeded, and... | Hacker News

Possible blog post? HNer complains that a sentence misuses terms from physics. Terms are actually being applied correctly and problem is that HNer hasn't understood the English sentence.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences - Abstract - Homing in on Consciousness in the Nervous System: An Action-Based Synthesis

Looks interesting, not on libgen yet. 10.1017/S0140525X15000643

Liar's dice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Becoming a contractor programmer in the UK | Hacker News

Bunch of people in the comments saying that the previously-saved link is rubbish (but they give evidence, so it's not completely useless)

switching-to-contracting-uk/README.md at master · tadast/switching-to-contracting-uk

Use offline and online social networks, not recruiters.

easy brown lentils

Very simple recipe

Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code | Facebook

Why I’m Breaking Up With the Apple Watch - NYTimes.com

This is a good talking piece for my watch.

Reverse engineering flash memory for fun and benefit

https://thinkinglegally.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/human-rights-act-are-these-cases-trivial

Elevated

The code for the 4k demo Elevated running in the browser. Amazing to see the source code for this thing.

[Talk] Demis Hassabis - The Theory of Everything

Don't fuck with paste - Chrome Web Store

Stops websites from disabling pasting

Electric brain stimulation decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice | KurzweilAI

There was a guy at the hackspace who wanted to run a current through his brain. Not sure if he ever did, but I was curious to see what happened because up until this point it looked like tcds did nothing at all. However this study shows that it actually does harm.

Problematic PHP Cryptography Advice in Popular Questions - Meta Stack Overflow

This is a pretty good general overview on the current state of the art. Or at least, it probably is -- I'll wait a few days before using it just to see if some other expert takes it down first.

Cheap LED Teardown : electronics

Example use of a capacitive dropper power supply

UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration - Dropper Calculations

Types of power supply: resistive and capacitative. Very simple page doesn't include rectifier, discharge resistor for capacitor, resistor to limit inrush current, fuse etc.

$1 Coin Cell Charger | Hackaday

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

At some point, the late bird shows up.

Unlocking the potential of Sagemcom 2704N | Community Site

work router

Does Deep Learning have any advantages over Numenta's CLA/HTM? : artificial

Why we shouldn’t map the brain | Prospect Magazine

"There is an element here of the popular (but false) idea that you never truly understand something until you can build it." Yes! It is weird to see this idea getting traction with otherwise quite sensible people

The science behind Taptics and Force Touch | iMore

Haptics, Linear Resonant Actuator -- the next thing after unbalanced motors.

Sparks of consciousness mapped in most detail yet - life - 09 April 2015 - New Scientist

It now seems that conscious perception requires brain activity to hold steady for hundreds of milliseconds

Buckfast Tonic Wine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The beverage has entered the popular lexicon with nicknames such as "Wreck the Hoose Juice", "Commotion Lotion", "Mrs. Brown", "Buckie Baracas", "Coatbridge Table Wine", "Cumbernauld rocket fuel", and a bottle of "what the hell are you looking at?"

Commander Rob Pike tries to write standard higher-order functions in Go; finds that it is easy to implement, and confirms that no one should ever want or need it

I know this is PCJ but just look at the code. Empty interfaces and reflection, just a dreadful implementation. "It wasn't hard and I don't need it. You shouldn't use it"

Hacking Philips Hotel Televisions | rownet.co.uk

This worked but then the TV couldn't play videos from my USB stick. :(

Stanford Seminar - Melissa O'Neill of Harvey Mudd College - YouTube

The talk about pcg-random. This was really interesting and easy to follow.

PCG, A Family of Better Random Number Generators | PCG, A Better Random Number Generator

Really interesting talk on these (see next bookmark) but basically the claim is that they are a new class of RNGs which are small, well-understood, fast, statistically random, unpredictable, and significantly better than existing algorithms (such as Mersenne Twister, Minstd, XorShift) at most of these things.

The Love/Hate Relationship with DDR SDRAM Controllers

DDR is complex.

How to Directly Program an Inexpensive ESP8266 WiFi Module | Hackaday

Spherification - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/12/sweden-stopped-selling-arms-to-saudi-arabia?CMP=fb_gu

ci20_other_files/H5TQ2G83CFR.h at master · ZubairLK/ci20_other_files

CI20 lowered / altered RAM timings

Why do we care about Xiaomi? — Benedict Evans

Argues that Xiaomi is innovating with its Android devices rather than just copying, and hints that this signals a change. It'd be much more interesting if the successor to smartphones comes out of China in the next few years.

MultiROM Manager - Android Apps on Google Play

Run multiple Android images on one device -- good for app testing, but not great for ROM verification (e.g. won't run with encrypted /data)

A Woman Drinking with Two Men

What I just got framed

How to Make Vegan Butter - Regular Vegan Butter - Coconut Oil Base - Veganbaking.net - Recipes, desserts and tips