musings from the sleep deprived

c’mon feel the noise. girls, rock your boys…

Didn’t have as much time this week for reading/research. Chaos reigns supreme, it seems…

• Soviet Space Cannons! (popularmechanics)
• That there is a big stone. (bloomberg)
• Do good manners matter in software development? (peerj)
• Aircraft eject at 780mph. (F15einfo)

Nomnomnom… food for the mind.

• A somewhat negative review of Fallout 4. *cries* (arstechnica)
• Breathtakingly gorgeous. <3 nature. (guardian)
• How do we tolerate spicy food? (discover)
• Northern Cygnus over Tibet. (skyandtelescope)
• Carl Sagan (smithsonian)
• Hardest logic puzzle ever (nautil.us)
• Yay! More from Randall Munroe! (gatesnotes)
• OOOooo, story idea. (experiment)
• Rubber hand illusion. (newscientist)
• Reading dead scrolls. (newyorker)
• Publishing industry dark matter. (techcrunch)

I read, you read, we all read for…. ok, that didn’t work as well as I might have liked. Here are some links:

• Mario for AI research! (vice)
• Now we’re talking. Smartwatch that doesn’t break the aesthetic. (fossil) and review (arstechnica)
• This is pretty hilarious. Command line bullshittery. (blog)
• I loves me some meteors. One in Bangkok and one in Poland (guardian)
• Naturally occuring nuclear reactor. (medium)
• Data Scientist interview. Interesting views on data science. (blog)
• This has interesting potential. “Superman fends off alien invasion” game. (polygon)
• Great discussion in “near layman” terms about quantum/classical physics. (guardian)
• Coordination Avoidance in Distributed Databases (thesis)
• A love letter to science (nytimes)
• Do I hate Quicken enough to go CLI? (ledger)
• Maybe when I am a gojillionnaire. (arstechnica)

Some new links for the week. Let James Brown be your guide!

• Catch the biggest waves! (theatlantic)
• What *really* drains your battery? (blog)
• Very interesting. IT ideas that must die. (highscalability)
• The most popular MOOCs (onlinecoursereport)
• Crypto-entrepeneur. (arstechnica)
• Fuel cell cars getting closer. (forbes)
• VC level analysis of the EMC/Dell deal. (a16z)
• I had no idea this was happening. Wow. (fastcodesign)
• beer or wine? (bbc)
• Yay for Prison Architect!! (slate)
• Abandoned Games? Maybe not. (arstechnica)
• NOAA is fudging data, says Rep.Lamar Smith (arstechnica)

This week’s links, courtesy of yo momma’s tasty fried chicken…

• An Amazon response to the Times piece. (medium)
• Technology failure impacts visualized. (ieee)
• Good thing this new fangled thing is more secure. (arstechnica)
• Home automation tinkering (wsj)
• Identity online (about.me)
• I have no idea what to think about this. (bbc)
• Some thoughts on crytography (blog)
• Maybe we are mermaids. (nautil.us)
• $100M in controller design research. Yessssssss. (polygon)
• Finally, the LUCK video from Bethesda. (polygon)
• Drone disabling guns. (popularmechanics)
• Einstein and non-locality. (scientificamerican)

This week’s reading…

• The language used by climate scientists and their skeptics. (arstechnica)
• Recreational Math is important! (nytimes)
• Tech Giants are the Walking Dead (wired)
• I’m *keenly* interested to see where this goes (polygon)
• Screen UIs in the Martian (territory studio)
• The first keylogger! (arstechnica)
• Gegenschein! (skyandtelescope)
• The most prolific wikipedia editor. (priceonomics)
• Very cool bedsheets. (etsy)
• Freeman Dyson is the Man. (thereg)
• REM sleep on demand (berkeley)

And here we go again with another week’s worth of fun reading…

• International border visible from space (nasa)
• Hilarious generic tech recruiter letter (blog)
• TWO player bomb defusing game. Lovely idea. (arstechnica)
• Math is hard, mmmm’kay? (nature)
• Fallout4 S.P.E.C.I.A.L. videos (youtube)
• I’m afraid I don’t have anything to say about this. (guardian)
• Elephant genetics! (discover)
• Gene patents (arstechnica)
• View the Milky Way in many wavelengths! (chromoscope)
• Android TV from nVidia (arstechnica)
• Vulnerabilities in bitcoin (motherboard)

Aaaannnnddd…. another week of links!

• Fallout 4 is getting a lot of pre-release press. *drool* (polygon)
• Inventing languages for a living (npr)
• Neat map of RDBMS evolution over time (hpi.de)
• Yummy mechanical keyboard love. (polygon)
• RIP, Alex King (poststatus)
• And I don’t even drink coffee. More fool me, it seems. (harvard)
• Whoa. worms eating plastic. (stanford)
• Some of the things on this wishlist are AWESOME. (nautilus)

This week’s links!

I should mention, though perhaps for some it goes without saying, that I don’t necessarily agree with all of the things I’m pointing to here. In fact, I’d go so far as to say some of them are just blatantly wrong. However, I point them out because they are interesting reading. Your own brain is going to have to reach its own conclusions about the veracity of the article, its source(s) and whether what they purport should influence your own thinking or opinions. I’m not an expert on (ok, most of) these topics. You may be. If you want heated debate, we can take that up over a beer. In the meantime, I’m just going to throw stuff out there for your amusement, and leave it up to you whether you elect to consume this fare or not. Enjoy…
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Links from this week:

• Robotic legs on helicopters! (alphr)
• Ah, Infocom. You were my first love. (mit.edu)
• And, hilarity ensues around Burning Man (sfist blog)
• Thoughts on AI, brought to you by Google (bbc.com)
• Rubik’s cube solver, *cries* (blog)
• Oh my goodness. Thanks for the link Tom. (chocolatey)
• Ok, this is just weird. Cool, but weird. (guardian)
• The blockchain is mesmerizing to watch (blockchain)
• List of bitcoin/blockchain white papers (startup management)
• Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, has a new game coming out (ars technica)
• Staggering. scale model of the solar system (universe today)

Enjoy!

More links from this week’s reading…

• Some very insightful points on data science and Big Data. (blog)
• I miss mutt. Was using this actively up until about 3 years ago. (vice.com)
• Don’t forget playtime, kids (for parents). (wash.post)
• Remember Diablo? Here’s some insider discussion from the principals in making that happen. Great insight into the gaming industry around that time, and how Blizzard was involved. (usgamer.net)
• Science. Ah, science. Bloody, science. The king is dead. Long live the king. (facebook post)
• Procedural dungeon creation. Nom nom nom. (gamasutra)
• Ok, now this is a fascinating approach to site-specific passwords. (networkworld)
• This is so chewy, I don’t even know where to begin. And work-relevant, as it happens. (blog)
• And this? This is just hilarious. I can’t form words for laughing so hard. (ars technica)
• Going to have to find this book. I <3 Lem. (nautil.us)

Enjoy!

Here’s my attempt at some weekly content aggregation from stuff I’ve read in the past week that was interesting. Curated from a variety of my RSS feeds. The focus will be on the things I generally read. Tech news, science news, gaming news, TV/movie/media news, etc. Occasionally someone else throws me a link that hits my brainpan too. Without further ado, the inaugural first set of Sapientia Delecti… Read more

Much time has passed since the last update, and quite a lot has changed since then.
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I think I’m going to start blogging a weekly “Stuff I’ve read and found interesting” kind of post. I have no idea if anyone would find this useful at all. It will be roughly even mix of tech news, science stuff, gaming stuff and a miscellaneous esoterica kind of category probably. I guess we’ll see if it draws more traffic.

I started this post nearly two years ago, and it has been sitting in my “Drafts” folder since then, untouched.

I recently came up against a need for which Amazon’s cloud was once against the hand’s down most cost effective way to meet my needs, and I figured it was worth documenting the use case. If you don’t know already, I play minecraft. I have a realm. I’ve hosted my own server in the past, and have done a whole mess of stuff with it over the years, including some pixelart (which I will link once I’m not at work anymore). Realms don’t support any kind of mods or plugins, or maps, etc. And so I’ve had to do some manual work to get a map of our realm available online. When I was using fragnet (had great experience with them, btw … our use case just changed is all), they had basically one click install options for using dynmap, a popular dynamic mapping system for minecraft, and it basically auto-magically maintained the map for me, no maintenance or anything necessary. It would update reasonably quickly after you explored more of your world, and all was well in the world.
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