Originally shared by Emlyn O’Regan
Debugging a lisp interpreter is a special kind of hell.
Debugging a lisp interpreter is a special kind of hell.
Month: October 2015
This is pretty cool. All it needs now is a weeding module.
This is pretty cool. All it needs now is a weeding module.
Via Emlyn O’Regan
Originally shared by John Said
And this is supposed to make me feel better?
And this is supposed to make me feel better? I’d be feeling a lot safer if there was an order of magnitude or two between these two figures.
Originally shared by Buddhini Samarasinghe
Red meat and cancer risk
The news is awash with stories about how red and processed meats have been classified as carcinogens in the same category as tobacco. But what exactly does this mean? Let’s unpick this a little bit before throwing out the bacon with the bathwater.
There have been several excellent bits of writing that explain what this means – the first is by Ed Yong (http://goo.gl/br9OU7) and the second by CRUK* (http://goo.gl/ELDzCI). These are well-worth a read if you want to learn more.
Basically, the key bit of information to remember is that this is not a risk assessment, it is a hazard identification. A great analogy (stolen from the CRUK article above) is to think of banana skins – they definitely can cause accidents, but in practice it doesn’t happen very often, and isn’t as severe as being in a car accident. But under the hazard identification approach, banana skins and cars would be in the same category because they both definitely cause accidents. The severity of the accident is not discussed, and that’s where we tend to get lost with the breathless press releases on this topic.
So should you stop eating red and processed meat? The answer is all about the dreaded, boring M word – moderation. If you’re always eating red and processed meat, over years and years, then that’s probably not good for you. But meat in moderation (i.e. not too much and not too often) is still okay, and is definitely not as bad as smoking is. The thing with diet and disease is that reality is often rather boring; there are no miracle diets or magical juice cleansers that will give you eternal youth. There are no superfoods that offset the damage of binge-drinking every weekend. That’s just not how our bodies work.
What you can do to prevent cancer is eat plenty of fruit and veg with lots of fibre while cutting back on things like alcohol, salt, red and processed meats. And definitely avoid sunburns and smoking.
*In the interest of full disclosure, I work at the charity CRUK as a science communicator.
#ScienceEveryday
Imagine what it will be like when television is common.
Imagine what it will be like when television is common. Political discourse will become so superficial and trivial! Politicians will behave almost like vaudeville entertainers or moving picture stars!
Interesting things to note about this picture: the “televisor” set depicted is based on Logie Baird’s mechanical television. The device used a “Nipkow” disc which span rapidly and had a series of holes near the outer edge arranged in a gentle spiral. When the disc rotated, the holes swept lines across the screen on the right and produced a vertical raster. A light bulb behind the screen modulated its brightness according to which part of the image had was being scanned by a hole. Nipkow discs could only produce a tiny image relative to their radius so the screen was usually made bigger by using a magnifying lens.
You would think a company like Google would understand something about naming.
You would think a company like Google would understand something about naming. It is after all the choice of the name of a product or service which makes it possible to talk about and even more importantly to find in a search engine. Instead they use stupidly generic names which mean that many of their excellent services never get known outside the narrow world of early adopters. The only ones that ever really prosper are the ones with distinct names. Eg. YouTube, Gmail etc.
Google+ was doomed from the start to never leave its niche by the choice of its name. Hangouts were destined to a middling fate by a combination of its awful ui and the inability (unlike Skype or Google) use its name as a verb.
Via Keith Wilson
Once unleashed the robots will toil for centuries mining and transporting minerals without human intervention.
Once unleashed the robots will toil for centuries mining and transporting minerals without human intervention. Robot miners never need sleep, they never need rest. When they falter they can be cannibalized by others for scrap iron and spare parts. The final step is when the robot miners start fabricating bigger and better robot miners by smelting the ore that they extract. Then they can go on indefinitely, certainly long after we’re all gone.
Originally shared by Wayne Radinsky
Rio Tinto says its automated trucks in Pilbara, where they have 15 mines and associated rail lines and ports, are outperforming its traditional human-driven fleet by 12%.
“At our Nammuldi mine in the Pilbara we now have the largest autonomous truck fleet in the world. This fleet outperforms the manned fleet by about 12 per cent and we have seen a commensurate saving in load and haul costs due to the greater efficiency. The improved utilisation allows us to run the same mine using a smaller size fleet, which means lower capital expenditure.”
Jwz reports:
Jwz reports:
For decades, hackers have strived to retire ‘Le Grand Sexpr’ — the platinum and iridium symbolic expression that for 126 years has defined the cons cell from a high-security vault outside Paris. Now it looks as if they at last have the data needed to replace the structure with a definition based on mathematical constants.
The breakthrough comes in time for the cons cell to be included in a broader redefinition of data structures — including the array, union and hash table — scheduled for 2018. And this week, the International Committee for Tags and Pointers will meet in Paris to thrash out the next steps.
“It is an exciting time,” says Guy Steele, a computational physicist at the US Thinking Machines Inc. “It is the culmination of intense, prolonged efforts worldwide.”
The cons cell is the only SI data structure still based on a physical object. Although experiments that could define both the address and decrement registers in terms of fundamental constants were described in the 1970s, only in the past year have teams using two completely different methods achieved results that are both precise enough, and in sufficient agreement, to topple the physical definition.
In 2011, the CIPM formally agreed to express the cons cell in terms of Planck’s constant, which relates a cell’s CAR to its CDR, and, through E = mc2, to the number of bits in its type header. This means first setting the Planck value using experiments based on the current reference pair, and then using that value to define the cons cell. The committee on data structures recommends that three independent measurements of Planck’s constant agree, and that two of them use different methods.
The relationship between NIL, chassis ground and Earth ground will continue to be a subject of ongoing debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)
Hilarious.
Hilarious.
Originally shared by CJ Dulberger
Welp, that’s awkward.
Cache is the new RAM
Originally shared by Ramin Honary
Cache is the new RAM
I’m not sure how I missed this awesome article from last year, presenting a brief history of the various trends and fads in big-data and enterprise computing since the year 2000. All of the engineering problems brought on by new technology are really just Hollywood-movie-reboots of problems that are as old as computing itself. The only difference now is that things happen faster and at larger scales.
But the mathematics of Turing machines have never changed since inception in the 1940s. One result of Turing’s thesis was that adding more Turing machines in parallel doesn’t make a more powerful machine that can compute stuff we couldn’t compute with just one. Adding more Turing machines just makes a larger, more complicated Turing machine that may produce your result in less time at the expense of more energy. So none of our problems are really that new no matter how much we scale-up or parallelize our workloads.
(Tagging John Hardy not a Turnbull fan on this, if he hasn’t read it already. You and your clique may like this article.)
John Hardy Developer 