A Week's worth of Lifty Ninks

Anthropology/History

• Polynesians visited South America and took sweet potatos home with them

Art

• Art in QR codes

Baseball

• Joe Posnanski's Musial Retrospective

Books

• Search Engine/Library for Ebooks. "The world's largest ebook library"

Computing

• "How Particle Physics Is Improving Recommendation Engines"
• NES in FPGA
• Parsing and Evaluating PHP in Haskell
• Ohloh. "is a free, public directory of Free and Open Source Software and the contributors who create and maintain it. Ohloh Code is a publicly available, free code search site that indexes most of the projects in Ohloh."
• TPIE. The templated portable I/O environment. Written for/in C++ "TPIE is a library for manipulating large datasets on a desktop computer. TPIE provides implementations of several external memory algorithms and data structures as well as a framework for efficient and portable data processing"
• SciPy Lecture Notes

Culture

• Freakanomics Experiments. "Sometimes in life you face a major decision, and you just don’t know what to do. You’ve considered the issue from every angle. But no matter how you look at it, no decision seems to be the right decision. In the end, whatever you choose will essentially be a flip of a coin. Help us by letting Freakonomics Experiments flip that coin for you.

Education

• "Why Smart Poor Students Don't Apply to Selective Colleges and How to Fix It"

Excessive Cosplay

• Working Iron Man Laser Gauntlet

Gaming

• Bethesda taking beta applications for Elder Scrolls Online
• Company using custom Portal 2 Levels in it's application process
• Embedded reports from 500 person Combat LARP
• Reddit discussion on 2800 player EVE battle. Different post, awesome comment. The Mittani article.

History

• ORBIS. "The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World"
• Hardcore History: Fear, its context and its manipulators. "Using the two 20th Century "Red Scare" eras as case studies, Dan looks at the fear that can be generated by potentially dangerous ideas and examines the way such powerful mass emotions can cloud human judgment."

Logic

• Logic. Online text on logical reasoning. Book is out of print

Math

• Documentary on the Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
• Finite Fields and Reed-Solomon Coding

Medicine

• Reversible Male Birth Control via injection of polymer gel

Mind Maps

• Mindmup. Online, opensource mind mapping.
• Blumind. "Blumind is a lightweight and powerful mind mapping tool, and it is free." Windows only, it appears.

Music

• Lenny Kravitz Here's "Fly Away" being played down the streeet, shows up, joins in

Spaceflight

• "DARPA Unveils Robotic Plan to Reuse/Recycle Satellites"
• Saturn V Gas Generator Recreated and Tested
• Masten Space Systems Postgraduate Fellowships
• Deep Space Industries. Another asteroid mining group.

Society

• Insightful commentary on post scarcity in reddit discussion

xkcd

• Swimming in Fuel Rod Disposal Pools

When the Earth was hit by a Gamma Ray Burst, Optimal Seasoning of Cast Iron Pans and Traditional Revealing Korean Outfits

Astronomy

• Earth Hit By Gamma Ray Burst in 775 AD

Chemistry

• Blog Syn. "Crowdsourcing meets Organic Synthesis. Speed and Aplomb." A site documenting bloggers' attempts to use published methods to create chemicals.

Cooking

• Optimal Cast Iron Pan Seasoning. And the chemistry behind it.

Computing

• Brainfuck CPU
• Topcoder ISS Solar Panel Configuration Competition. "The goal of the challenge is to position the solar collectors on the International Space Station to generate as much power as possible during the most difficult orbital configuration."
• Linux being developed away from Unix philosophy. "I’m not sure that this is a bad design, but it is most definitely not UNIX or anything like it."
• ShareLaTeX. Collaborative LaTeX environment.
• texlive.js. LaTeX in JavaScript and thus runnable in the browser.
• Myrddin. A functional flavored close to metal language.

Culture

• Slant: StackOverflow for subjective questions. "Slant helps you decide on subjective topics quickly. Instead of having to read multiple blog posts or dig through comment threads you can read summarized perspectives on topics with no definitive answer."

• Korean historical dress and exposed female nipples. Makes good sense from a breastfeeding standpoint. Not safe for puritanical work environments. See also wiki page on Décolletage

• Isaac Asimov's Visions of the Future

Information Theory

• Youtube Series of shorts on Information Theory

History

• Hardcore History Podcast

Music

• The Correspondents' "Well Measured Vice" Video. Animated by hand by the lead singer.

Productivity

• "Programmer Interrupted". Discussion on the properties of a task and the (human) memory types in utilizes and how they affect interruption response.

Science

• "Metamaterials perform image compression before light reaches the sensor". Not sure if the compression is lossy or not.

Spaceflight

• Fingernail clipping in space

Minecraft in Schools, Rapid Fire Archery, Inflatable Space Station Modules

Academia

• Academia.edu."Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research."

Biology

• Microbes in Glass.

Computing

• "Graph Traversal: solving the 8-puzzle with basic A.I.".

• Walmart Labs. Walmart's technology branch. They even have an active GitHub account

• "Mixing C and C++ Code in the Same Program"

• "The Visual 6502" Full microprocessor simulation in Javascript

Education

• Swedish school integrates Minecraft into its curriculum

Engineering

• "Kerosene lamps face gravity-powered usurper"

Martial Arts

• Explanation of historical archery. And an awesome video.

Journalism

• CNET/CBS row and the limits of disclosure

Spaceflight

• Bigelow Aerospace contracted to create inflatable modules for ISS

• Under the Hood with the SpaceX Merlin Engine

The Best Sports Writing 'Til Posnanski, The Slingshot Channel and the Tapeworm-pomorphic principle

Computing

• "How to implement an algorithm from a scientific paper"

• Yet another CS reading list

Economics

• "From Simplistic to Complex Systems in Economics"

Electronics

• Multifunction Tattoo: Resistor Color Code, Ruler, Sexuality Statement

Philosophy

• Tapeworm Logic. "Welcome to the Fermi paradox, mired in shit. Shall we itemize the errors that the tapeworm is making in its analysis?"

Slingshots

• The Slingshot Channel.

Sports(writing)

• "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?". "Regarded as perhaps the finest piece of sportswriting on record, the furious saga of Teddy Ballgame — from boy to man and near death — is an unmatchable remembrance for an American icon."

Spaceflight

• Gun Launched Space Missions Video

Study

• "How to Read a Paper" (PDF)

News

Aviation

• Glider Pilot harassed and arrested for legal overflight of nuclear plant

Amazing Pickpockets, Noise Hot Nickels, Linux Powered Rifles and Way More

Entertainment

• Video of Apollo Robbins, Amazing Pickpocket."He is probably best known for an encounter with Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail in 2001. While Carter was at dinner, Robbins struck up a conversation with several of his Secret Service men. Within a few minutes, he had emptied the agents’ pockets of pretty much everything but their guns. Robbins brandished a copy of Carter’s itinerary, and when an agent snatched it back he said, “You don’t have the authorization to see that!” When the agent felt for his badge, Robbins produced it and handed it back. Then he turned to the head of the detail and handed him his watch, his badge, and the keys to the Carter motorcade." --The New Yorker

• "Sleep No More : What It’s Like Inside the World’s Most Interactive Play".

Computing

• Battlecode.
  • MIT Site. "Teams of one to four students enter 6.370 and are given the Battlecode software and a specification of the game rules in early January. Each team develops a player program, which will be run by each of their robots during Battlecode matches. Contestants often use artificial intelligence, pathfinding, distributed algorithms, and/or network communications to write their player. At the final tournaments, the autonomous players are pitted against each other in a dramatic head-to-head tournament. The final rounds of the MIT tournament are played out in front of a live audience, with the top teams receiving cash prizes. The total prize pool is approximately $40,000. "

• Android Accessory Development Kit, "The Accessory Development Kit (ADK) is a reference implementation for hardware manufacturers and hobbyists to use as a starting point for building accessories for Android. Each ADK release is provided with source code and hardware specifications to make the process of developing your own accessories easier. Creating new and alternative hardware based on the ADK is encouraged!"

• "An Aristotelian Understanding of Object-Oriented Programming"

• 12 CS Books

• Embedded Linux Wiki

• 1 Year Online Post Baccalaureate Computer Science Degree. "This is a unique post-baccalaureate program in computer science that is possible to complete in one year. The program is offered by Oregon State University's renowned School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and delivered online through OSU Ecampus."

• "Decorators and Functional Python"

• "What every computer science major should know"

• UTHash. "Any C structure can be stored in a hash table using uthash. Just add a UT_hash_handle to the structure and choose one or more fields in your structure to act as the key. Then use these macros to store, retrieve or delete items from the hash table."

Spaceflight

• Russian Simulated Trip to Mars Summary

• "Bigelow Aerospace Signs Space Station Module Deal With NASA"

Medicine/Biology

• Oncolytic virus. "An oncolytic virus is a virus that preferentially infects and lyses cancer cells; these have obvious functions for cancer therapy, both by direct destruction of the tumour cells, and, if modified, as vectors enabling genes expressing anticancer proteins to be delivered specifically to the tumor site."

• Threat of Untreatable Gonorrhea rising

New Hotness

• Hot Nickel sphere dropped in water. Make sure the sound is on.

• High Effeciency Solar Steam Generation With Nanoparticles (and without concentrators)

Society

• SMBC On Privacy and the "Nothing to hide" argument
• "What 186 MPH of Wind in the Face Looks Like". The idea for Blow Job came during an open studio event in his hometown of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Cern decided he wanted to do something “entertaining, that would make people laugh and in which everyone could participate.” The idea to blow wind into people’s faces popped into Cern’s head. He made a special light source to create a clean background for the images and then had an assistant turn on a wind machine while Cern took the pictures.

Augmented Reality Rifles

• "$17,000 Linux-powered rifle brings “auto-aim” to the real world"

Culture

• '“Buffy vs Edward” remix unfairly removed by Lionsgate'
• "Look How Far We’ve Come Apart". "But America is not united and it is getting less and less unitable with each passing decade. You can see us coming apart in three simple graphs."

Copyright

• New Media Rights. "New Media Rights is a non-profit program that provides legal services, education, and advocacy for Internet users and creators."

Cosmology

• Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model. "is a parametrization of the Big Bang cosmological model in which the universe contains a cosmological constant, denoted by Lambda, and cold dark matter. It is frequently referred to as the standard model of Big Bang cosmology..."

3-D Printing

• Shapeways. "Shapeways is a 3D Printing marketplace and community"

Education

• Peeragogy. "This book, and accompanying website, is a resource for self-organizing self-learners."

Standardization

• ISO 4074:2002 "Natural latex rubber condoms -- Requirements and test methods"

Math

• GMailTeX. "GmailTeX is a plugin which adds (La)TeX capability to Gmail and Gmail Chat."

15 Year Olds Published In Nature and Why They Can't Afford Textbooks

Note: I managed to accidentally delete the most recent version which had between 2 and 3 times as many links. That's frustrating. Commit early, commit often. Also, using twitter probably wouldn't hurt.

Astronomy

• 15 year published in Nature for work on. He's actually the 10th author. His dad is the first. "A vast, thin plane of corotating dwarf galaxies orbiting the Andromeda galaxy".

Math

• "P-adic arithmetic". "P-adics are an alternative to the real numbers. In fact, in a way, they are the alternative to real numbers."
• Heyting Algebra. Intuitionist equivalent of Boolean algebras.
• StackExchange: Learning Lambda Calculus.

Society

• "Fred Rogers talks about Tragic Events in the News". "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world." Also, there's a Fred Rogers Company and website.
• "Choose Your Own Crime Stats". Youtube video. Most telling comment is along the lines of "50% drop in crime in the past 20 years and no one is taking credit."

Entertainment/Culture

• "Pop Culture Happy Hour: Is Everything Worse Than Ever? And A Gift Guide!". Specifically for Glen's critics/cancer fighting enzyme metaphor. Also brings up the "Hollywood's Year of Heroine Worship"

Resumes and Typesetting

• RPI's LaTeX Resume Templates
• "Creating Your Resume in Latex". Reddit discussion and blog post.

Computing

• Haskell :: Functional Programming with Types. Haskell Wikibook
• Baby Alligators: Gamified Lambda Calculus

Science

• Periodic Table of Videos
• Three Myths about scientific peer review

Economics

• 'Writing the "The Market for 'Lemons'": A Personal and Interpretive Essay'
• "Why Are College Textbooks So Absurdly Expensive?". "You thought the rising cost of college tuition was bad? Then check out the rising cost of college textbooks. The American Enterprise Institute's Mark Perry has put together this nifty chart showing the egregious, 812 percent rise in the cost of course materials since 1978, as captured in the Bureau of Labor Statistics's consumer price index data."

Leaded Gas Driving Crime, Coffee, Mosquitos, Uncertainty and Far More

Computing

• Vigil. A language so safe that it deletes unsafe code.

Webcomics/SMBC-Palooza

• SMBC: Videogames and Opportunity Cost
• SMBC: Economics. There's a short story along these lines from a while back by Phillip Jose Farmer, I think. The poor are required to consume gratuitous amounts of stuff, the weathly get to live in modest conditions as they see fit.
• SMBC: The meaning of it all in lava lamps

Society

• Ars: "Profits over your dead body"
• Crime rates correlate with the use of leaded gasoline.
  • Linked Blog post. "A good rule of thumb – I believe – for epidemics economic, biological or social is this: If it spreads along lines of communication its entropic information. If it travels along major transportation routes its microbial. If it spreads out like a fan, its an arthropod. If its everywhere, all at once, its a molecule."

Reasoning

• Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. "an informal fallacy in which pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern."
• TED: Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us. Fear is a form a storytelling and how we read those stories determines the choices we make. Some people -- entrepeneurs -- have productive paranoia and study their fears closely to prepare for the future.
• "The Truth Is Out There…Isn’t It?". "The authors hypothesize that people who are more numerate and scientifically literate are better at gathering information that confirms their existing beliefs. Kahan believes this happens, in part, for a pretty basic reason: we just want to fit in with our friends. So we work to maintain viewpoints that fall in line with our social group." aka Being better educated, numerate and scientifically literate leads to bandwagonism and confirmation bias.

Coffee

• Crema Crema is a big part of what makes an expresso an expresso and it apparently is a bit complicated.
• Reddit comment on Quality expresso machines

Math and Physics

• Undergrad to doctoral math and physics in a pdf. "These are step-by-verifiable-step notes designed to take students with a year of calculus based physics who are about to enroll in ordinary differential equations all the way to doctoral foundations in either mathematics and physics without mystery. Abstract algebra, topology (local and global) folds into a useful, intuitive toolset for ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations, be they linear or nonlinear. The algebraist, the topologist, the theoretical physicist, the applied mathematician and experimental physicist are artificial distinctions at the core. There is unity."
  • Related Reddit discussion

UAVs

• Dronenet: Distributed Drone Based Item Transport System

World Health

• TED: Hadyn Parry: Re-engineering mosquitos to fight disease. "In a single year, there are 200-300 million cases of malaria and 50-100 million cases of dengue fever worldwide. So: Why haven’t we found a way to effectively kill mosquitos yet? Hadyn Parry presents a fascinating solution: genetically engineering male mosquitos to make them sterile, and releasing the insects into the wild, to cut down on disease-carrying species."

Brains on Cosmic rays, Webcomics and/with Robots and Women of Historic Proportions

Historical Anatomy

• "1912's Perfect Woman Was From Brooklyn, Weighed 171 Lbs, Had Pear-Shaped Body"

Horizontal Biology -- no, not that.

• "How a quarter of the cow genome came from snakes". Horizontal gene transfer of the jumping genes BovB and friends.

Economics

• Peltzman effect/Risk compensation
• Robots Will Take Our Jobs

Webcomics

• Ars staff picks for best of 2012
• Ars readers' picks for best of 2012

Computing

• StackOverflow: Books on Haskell and Compilling
• Ubuntu's new phone OS
• Array Slices in DDD and GDB

Spaceflight

• "Galactic Cosmic Radiation Leads to Cognitive Impairment and Increased Aβ Plaque Accumulation in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer’s Disease"
  • Reddit discussion including paper author

Time

• Systems of Time