Space Porn, Air Conditioning and UAS Podcasts

Frickin' Sharks

• "Killer Sharks Invade Golf Course In Oz"

Prohibition

• "The Chemist's War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences". "The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people."

Space Porn

Actual space porn, not the kind that's awesome pictures of space

• The Greatest Science Fiction Porn Movies of All Time, 1961-1991. Not safe for work. It does suggest that Sex World is a decent movie.

Not actual space porn. Actually a story about tortoises in space

• Communist Moon Turtles

Approximately Computer Science

• Hardness of approximation: "In computer science, hardness of approximation is a field that studies the algorithmic complexity of finding near-optimal solutions to optimization problems."

Political Philosophy

• Excellent Reddit Comment on Natural Rights.

Societal improvements

• The effects of air conditioningon premature deaths in the US

UAVs

• sUASNews Podcast

Craiglist Craziness, Wearable Raspberry Pi and Build Your Own Radar

Computing

• ADA 2012
• Reddit Discussion on Integrators and Solar System Simulation
• Game Mentor Online: " a free service, open to mentors and protégés in all disciplines of games business and development. The program facilitates the mentoring relationship through key milestones to help protégés reach their professional goals."
• Game Physics Blog with articles on integrations and springs, at least.
• Reddit Discussion on Good and Bad C and C++ books
• Ars: "Raspberry Pi Creations..."

Culture

• "Craziest Craigslist Posts of 2012"

Crowdsourcing knowledge

• The Hammer Principle. Crowd source comparisons for finding the right tool for a job. Particularly programming languages.

Sensor Hacking

• MIT OCW Course on Handmade Synthetic Aperture Radar
• Open Hardware IR sensor compatible with Android and iPhone

UAVs

• Hinds Community College offering UAV pilot classes

Interwebz

• Jekyll.

is a simple, blog aware, static site generator.

It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Markdown or Textile and Liquid converters, and produces a static website suitable for any web server.

Fourier-bots, Transform!

Computing

• Surfraw Command line interface to search engines.

• Include What You Use. "The main goal of include-what-you-use is to remove superfluous #includes. It does this both by figuring out what #includes are not actually needed for this file (for both .cc and .h files), and replacing #includes with forward-declares when possible."
  • Deheader. A similar tool.

• Viewpoints Research Institute. "...organization... to improve "powerful ideas education" for the world's children and to advance the state of systems research and personal computing. Many of our themes co-evolved with the inventions of networked personal computers, graphical user interfaces and dynamic object-oriented programming.

Our globally dispersed research group comes from a tradition of whole systems design developed by ARPA in the sixties and Xerox PARC in the seventies. Our ideology is motivated by user-centered systems design. Using this vantage point, our group invents computing technologies, content, curriculum, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), programming languages, implementation systems and processor and memory structures." Alan Kay is president. * COLA. "A COLA is designed to be the simplest possible language which can be described in itself, so that the implementation exactly describes itself. In order to do this the structure of the environment is separated from the semantics of the computation performed."

Math

• An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform

Tau Ceti might have habital worlds and Quantum Spin Liquids

Analytics

• Google Flu Trends

• Google Fusion Tables

Hacking

• How to make a cell phone jammer
  • Wired: Howto link

Space

• Tau Ceti Might Have plents in the habital zone. 12 LY away.

• Space Transport and Engineering Wikibook

Science

• Quantum Spin Liquids, a new kind of magnetism

Culture

• Gittip: "a way to give small weekly cash gifts to people you love and are inspired by."

Hyperpolygotism and The Difficulty of Prevnting Massacres

Computing

• Hyperpolygot: commonly used features in a side-by-side format for languages and tools. And it's a a cool name.

Sports

• Zonal Marking's Christmas Soccer Book List

Spaceflight

• NASA Johnson Style Gangam Style Parody

• "Almost Everything You’ve Heard About the North Korean Space Launch Is Wrong"

Birdflight

• Golden Eagle Snatches a Baby. It appears the baby was not seriously harmed. May be a hoax, as well.

Policy

• "There's Little We Can Do To Prevent Another Massacre". Decently reasoned article on the practically of gun control laws and enforcement in the US.

Writing

• Charles Stross "Understanding Reader Reviews".

...many readers are incapable of separating their own emotional response to a text from the actual content of the text. "I do not like this" is isomorphic in their mind with "this is a bad book".

So: if your work is anything but a literalistic recapitulation of a traditional narrative theme, with sympathetic characters, clearly depicted antagonists, and a cosy sense of closure at the end that reinforces traditional cultural values ("and the prince married the princess and they all lived happily ever after") you can expect a fairy ring of one-star reader reviews to circle your work on Amazon. And the more challenging the novel, the more readers will feel the need to scream I HATED THIS! I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT AND IT MAKES ME FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE! THIS IS A BAD BOOK!

Neurology

• Fractionating Human Intelligence aka Intelligence Is Not A Scalar aka "IQ is 'a Myth'"

An AI Created Game, History in Color and Keynes vs Hayek

Computing/Gaming

• A Puzzling Present. A game for Android, Linux, Mac and Windows with mechanics designed by an AI.

• Blaze, the next generation of NumPy

Aerospace

• ALTA: "Alta is a leading European small company in the aerospace propulsion sector. We operate in research and development on space electric propulsion, chemical propulsion and aerothermodynamics. Our company provides testing services, high vacuum systems and facilities and space systems design and computational simulation tools. With a successful record of technology transfer cases, we are also active in the energy and industrial plasma sectors."

Historical Photography

• Shorpy "is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago."

• 1930s-40s in Color

Culture

• Peers Inc.. A specific example of the evolving economic model of network/peeraging/brand managing crowd sourced corporations.

UAVs

• UAV High bandwidth network. Literally Skynet

Rap battles

• "Fear the Boom and Bust" the Hayek vs. Keynes Macroeconomics Rap Album

• Epic Rap Battles of History

Terrifying Botany and Oscilloscope Playing Music

Terrifying Botany

• Dendrocnide moroides. "It is the most virulent species of stinging tree". Virulent species of stinging tree‽ Australia is terrifying.

Sometimes Terrifying Zoology

• The Ark In Space. "A compendium of creatures"

Computing

• Ars: GPU Clustering and Password Cracking

• Grabcad: "Free 3D CAD models from a community of mechanical engineers". The licensing rules are not immediately apparent.

Linux

• Command Line tool lists
  • Some useful Open Source Terminal Apps
  • Reddit discussion on the above
  • Long list of Linux terminal tools
• SparkleShare: "an Open Source (self hosted) file synchronisation and collaboration tool and is available for Linux distributions, Mac, and Windows."

History

• Reddit Ask Historians Thread on Pirates

• The Generals book review

• Mississippi State and Loyola-Il's race barrier breaking basketball game

Blogging/Internet Discussion

• "Danger Will Robinson". Primarily for "Oppression is deeply connected to our need to protect." Really damn insightful statement, I think.

• Response to a racist

• The Top Saved Comments and Posts of Reddit. Mmmm, meta.

• "How I Learned to Check Mine Instead of Making Fun of People’s Grammar on the Internet"

• The Morning News. "n online magazine of essays, art, humor, and culture published weekdays since 1999. In addition to our features, each day includes our morning and afternoon headlines, with links to the most interesting news items, articles, and oddities around the web."

Estimation

• xkcd on Model Rocket Powered Spaceships

Physics

• Topological Insulators

Literature

• The Lord of the Rings Family Tree Project

• Binding a hardback

Civil Liberties

• National Counter Terrorism Center expands datamining and data aggregation powers

Music

• Dave Grohl's Documentary Sound City

• Oscillofun: Music that, with an oscilloscope, is its own music video

Aviation

• Solar Impulse Solar Powered Plane

Making

• Solidoodle: 800 dollar 3D printer

• Wooden Titan 2 and Space Capsule Ornaments

Killing Math and A Broken NASA

Space, Etc.

• "NASA Is Broken and It's Up To Us to Fix It": '... the lack of a consistent vision has been a problem. The manned program is specifically called out as a paragon of confusion. "Other than the long-range goal of sending humans to Mars," notes the report, "there is no strong, compelling national vision for the human spaceflight program, which is arguably the centerpiece of NASA's spectrum of mission areas."'

• Golden Spike Commercial Lunar Missions

• Scale comparisons of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo Capsules and Launchers

Math Education

• Kill Math: "We are no longer constrained by pencil and paper. The symbolic shuffle should no longer be taken for granted as the fundamental mechanism for understanding quantity and change. Math needs a new interface."

• Better Explained: There’s always a better way to explain an idea. Insights are fluid, mutable, and work for different people. I’m sharing the insights that helped me, hoping they’ll help you too. Here’s my take on learning.

• Artificial Chimera

Sports Analysis

• The Case for Dennis Rodman

Computing

• Zim, a Desktop Wiki/Text Editor

• Computing Freedom and Power and Control

Chemistry

• Things I Won't work with: Chemist Derek Lowe's list of scary substances

• Fluorine: "The Tiger of Chemistry"

Sociology and Government

• "Why Waiting In Line Is Torture"

• "The Case For Governing By Lottery'

How it's made

• How Glasses Are Made At Lenscrafters, A Pictorial Account

DNA and Seminal Science

2012-12-05

Computing/Gaming

• HTML 5 Command and Conquer

Physics

• The Britney Spears Guide To Semiconductor Physics

Culture

• "Why I Never Play Hard To Get"

• The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows

Art

• DNA 11 DNA Gel Electropheresis Portraits.
  • Alternate Provider: DNA Imprints

Uncrewed Vehicles

• Phoenix Pilot: The goal of PhoenixPilot is to focus on writing high quality open source code for autopilots that can easily provide the basis for research projects or further development by anyone. The project focuses on high quality code, robust testing, and ease of use. Our target audience is professionals, researchers, and students, but we want to make those more advanced techniques easy and accessible for anyone.

• Raspberry Pi R/C Lego Car

Air

• Awesome Photograph and Article of English Electric Lightning Crash

Space

• SpaceX's Mars Rocket to be Methane Fuelled

• SWORDS (pdf warning). Army's small scale launcher. Blow down methane/lox system.
  • The Space Review Article discussing it
  • Aviation Week Article

• Mares One: "Mars One is a not-for-profit organisation that will take humanity to Mars in 2023"

• GRAIL Mission finds Luna to be cracked up and shallow

Both

• NASA Thesaurus

Human Sexuality

• An Ode to the Many Evolved Virtues of Human Semen

• Where Masturbation and Homosexuality Don't Exist

Incredible Cross Sections and more

2012-12-04

Pure Awesomeness

• Incredible Cross Sections of So Many Things and more...

Humor

• The Hater's Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog

Computing

• GameKlip PS3 Dualshock adapter for Android phones and Tablets.

• Theano.Python library for effecient manipulation of mathematical expressions with multidimensional arrays.

UAVs

• iRobot Flying Robot

Economics is all Relative

2012-12-03

Relativistic Economics

• Impact of Special Relativity on Securities Regulation

• Available Resources for Self Education in Physics

Computing

• GOCR Optical Character Recognition program

• Pyomo

• ODroid ultracompact ARM/Android system.

Education

• Finland's Not So Secret Education Sauce

Giant Sized Nifty Links

2012-11-29

Computing

• Doom 3 Source Code Review

Culture

• "My Open Source Cure For Brain Cancer"

• Chrimstmas Cards and the Rule of Reciprocation

• Dead Bodies On Mount Everest

History

• Ask Historians Master Book List

Planetary Sciencce

• Water On Mercury

Music

• Vsauce, "Will We Ever Run Out Of Music"

• Axis of Awesome, "4 Chords, 2011"

Physics

• Minute Physics, "Is Racewalking a Sport?"

• Veritasium Slinky Drop

Education

• Veritasium, "Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos"

Sports

• Greinke, Hamilton, Mental Health, Masculinity and Dignity

Spaceflight

• DOE and NASA Demonstrate Fission Reactor Prototype

UAVs

• Stanford Teachable Quadcopter UAV

A More Adult Nifty Links

2012-11-24

Interwebz

• "Why I Left Google". Short version: Excessive focus on ads and not content and servies.

Hardware

• Making a Vagina That Listens to Your Body
Hard to see how a genuine closed loop, self tuning mastubatory aid is going to sell any slower than hot cakes.

Books and Baseball

2012-11-22

Books!

• Good Reads. Ratings tracker, recommendation engine. Looks damn cool.

Style/Culture

• Elder Chinese Man Models Women's Clothing. And he's damn good at it.

• Content aggregator evolved, even. This Is Why I'm Broke is "is a free online magazine run by a bunch of geeks who partake in way too much online window shopping. For this reason, our staff has compiled an ever growing list of cool, useful, funny, and unique products." Including:
  • Anatomically Correct Heart Necklace

Sports

• Top Minor League Baseball Teams By Attendance
  • Southern League Attendance for reference.

Web Addiction

• Several Content aggregators:
  • Too Long; Didn't Read: Concise summaries of aggregated content.
  • Longform.org: "Longform.org posts new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the web, that are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser."
  • The Browswer: "We aim to help our readers discover the best writing available by recommending articles, interviews and books that are of interest to the intellectually curious reader."
  • Nifty Links: Oh, wait, you're already here... I probably should move to a format more like the others, though.

Up goer links are good

2012-11-21

Premier Link:

• The Up-goer Five Text Editor. Based off the xkcd Up-goer Five comic, this online text editor challenges you to only use words from the 1000 most common words in English. I love remix culture.

Culture

• Fiona Apple on her dog

Programming/Computer Science

Blogger's note: programming.reddit.com was a gold mine today.

• Extremist Programming. "...sometimes you should use the wrong tool for the job—because it might be the right tool, and you just don’t know it yet."
  • Reddit Discussion

• Perl, the first postmodern computer language

• Why [Somebody] has given up coding standards

• There's no such thing as software productivity

2012-11-20

• Sources of College Freshman Classes, Interactive Maps and Graphs

Food Engineering

• Natural Heat Transfer Coefficients of Chicken Drum Shaped Bodies.

A Plumber with a Portal Gun Dies A Million Deaths (but he's no coward)

Link(s) of the Day

• Micromorts. One way to look at the value of life.

• Mari0. Portal/Super Mario Brothers mashup. Open source. With multiplayer. And a level editor.

2012-11-19

Culture

• How Lazy Magnolia Brewery in Mississippi Came to be.

• Exit: The God Father of Modern Improv. Of course improv is an art. How do people have these arguments?

• "Who The Hell is Moe Berg?"

Sports

• WBC Windup is an in depth blog covering the 2013 World Baseball Classic

Video Games

• Mari0. Portal/Super Mario Brothers mashup. Open source. With multiplayer. And a level editor.

2012-11-18

Android

• The Guardian Projecct

Philosophy, etc.

• Micromorts. One way to look at the value of life.

The Standard Model, Now in Poster Form!

2012-11-17

Link of the Day

The Standard Model: The Poster. The Standard Model of particle physics is arguably the pinnacle of scientific achievement.

Math and programming

Unifying Math and Programming

Interwebz!

A couple of distributed social networking applications/frameworks: * OpenBook * tent.io

Hardware

• iFixit Nexus 4 teardown
• MorpHex RobotIt's a ball, it's spider, no it's both! It's Spiderball MorpHex!
  • MorpHex Creator's Blog/Site
  • Once again, Special Thanks to James Shewmake

Science

• The Standard Model: The Poster. The Standard Model of particle physics is arguably the pinnacle of scientific achievement.
  • Actual Posters for Sale at the Contempary Physics Education Project
  • PDF of an older version

LotD: Awesomely Animated Factorization

2012-11-16

Link of the Day

Animated Factorization Diagrams

Programming and Computer Science

• Animated Factorization Diagrams
  • Animated Factorization Diagrams, no limit. The standard version has a limit of 10,000.
  • How to generate such diagrams
  • An informative discussion on the diagrams on reddit

Gaming

• Google's Android Alternate Reality Game, Ingress. Best gues I've heard about this is that it's a clever way to farm pedestrian pathing data.

Science

• Shoutout to James Shewmake's SCIENE! column. This week he's hononring Carl Sagan with a discussion of science popularizers.

Sports

• The Next Great Knuckleballer. Talented knuckleballer Chelsea Baker might have a shot at professional baseball.

2012-11-13

Programming and Computer Science

Guy Steele "Growing a Language"

Kickstarter In Space

Really, just a link round up:

Link Round-up:

Plasma Drive Prototype on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2027072188/plasma-jet-electric-thrusters-for-spacecraft

Apollo Mission Control Flight Controller Console Breakdown: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/10/apollo-flight-controller-101-every-console-explained/

NASA Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.nasa

NASA looking for feedback on NASA API: http://open.nasa.gov/blog/2012/10/09/how-would-you-use-a-nasa-api/

Apologies for any repetition.

Open Politics Sites

Ballotpedia: An Interactive Almanac of State Politics

OpenCongress: For Tracking Congress. "Everyone can be an insider"

Physics games and Language origins

http://www.theuniverseandmore.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/24/science/0824-origins.html?ref=science