Can someone explain to me how G+ notifications work?

Posted by on October 23, 2014 6 comments
I'll get a notification about a post by people I don't have in a circle, and they haven't +mentioned me in the post, and the post says it is "Shared publicly".  These are usually spammy posts like this one:

 https://plus.google.com/u/0/104315922029442462440/posts/GEC5VMwfAgm

Why do I get notifications for these?  By "notification" I mean I get the red indicator by the bell at the top of Google sites, and a notification via G+ on my phone.


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This guy implemented his own Cray-1A, the coolest supercomputer ever made

Posted by on October 16, 2014 11 comments
If anyone out there has access to any software that ran on the Cray-1A, contact this person.  Apparently, SGI destroyed their software archives and this is the one thing you can't find on the internet.

» Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two (see previous attempt) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the …


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This story reminded me of something John Cavil said on Battlestar Gallactica:

Posted by on October 13, 2014 16 comments
I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to — I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body.

From the article:

She’s also a tetrachromat, which means that she has more receptors in her eyes to absorb color. The difference lies in Antico's cones, structures in the eyes that are calibrated to absorb particular wavelengths of light and transmit them to the brain. The average person has three cones, which enables him to see about one million colors. But Antico has four cones, so her eyes are capable of picking up dimensions and nuances of color—an estimated 100 million of them—that the average person cannot. “It’s shocking to me how little color people are seeing,” she said.

This Woman Sees 10 Times More Colors Than The Average Person
A unique genetic mutation and a well-wired brain mean that Concetta Antico is like no other artist on Earth.


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Posted by on October 1, 2014 1 comment


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Mining bitcoin by hand

Posted by on September 30, 2014 No comments
Not much to say about this other than that it's pretty cool.

Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day
I decided to see how practical it would be to mine Bitcoin with pencil and paper. It turns out that the SHA-256 algorithm used for mining is pretty simple and can in fact be done by hand. Not surprisingly, the process is extr…


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Amazing rendered video of a fictional dude's face and head.

Posted by on September 30, 2014 4 comments
Amazing rendered video of a fictional dude's face and head.


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Rosette Nebula

Posted by on September 30, 2014 No comments

Composite, optical-only, and X-Ray only images.  

Read more here:  http://www.contriving.net/link/fx


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Things that cost more than space exploration

Posted by on September 27, 2014 No comments

A few examples from the below site:

• Money that has 'gone missing' from the US State Department
• Daylight Savings Time
• Tea
• Advertisements for prescription drugs

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Things That Cost More Than Space Exploration
As a reference for people who think that space exploration costs too much, here’s a list of things…

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Modern image recognition is within a few percent as good as humans.  

Posted by on September 10, 2014 No comments

But the trend is clear. “It is clear that humans will soon outperform state-of-the-art image classification models only by use of significant effort, expertise, and time,” say Russakovsky and co.

What I find really great about this is that libraries are already available for deep belief networks for us mere mortal programmers.

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The Revolutionary Technique That Quietly Changed Machine Vision Forever | MIT Technology Review
Machines are now almost as good as humans at object recognition, and the turning point occurred in 2012, say computer scientists.

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Posted by on September 10, 2014 No comments

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