Random list of interesting stuff this month:
- Some progress on gene editing (!)
- A very well-preserved dinosaur
- A profile of the old people steering old space probes.
- This is one of those headlines that doesn’t sound newsy. But it’s real: “The SF Giants Are Zapping Their Brains With Electricity. Will It Help?”
- Trying to imagine the future of the web (in 2050!) is an exercise in wishful thinking and dark humor.
- It’s a man … it’s a plane … it’s COBOL! Yes, apparently, there will be a shortage of COBOL programmers, real soon.
- Dung beetles can see the Milky Way in the sky, and navigate by it! (how do your navigational skills compare?)
- Also, there might be more water on the moon (like, much, much more).
- On a personal note, I had been using Ulysses for a while now (including right now) and had settled on the idea of paying for something good, but … they went with a subscription-only model, and I don’t know if I want to follow. Obviously, this is contentious, with multiple opinions (though not totally surprising), and … I’m still undecided.
- A periodic reminder that there is a tech “bubble”, and sometimes it’s worth getting out.
- Brilliant bit of musing on the future of programming languages
- If your name is null, you’re gonna have a bad time.
- There are “jellyfish galaxies” with “tentacles” that “feed” supermassive black holes. Anything can be anthropomorphized, really. Or rather, it has to be, just to make sense at this scale.
- The Babylonians, it turns out, may have known about the Pythagoras Theorem a millennia before Pythagoras (image at top).
- Finally, a fantastic account of a fantastic internship, where a simple-sound problem resulted in a deep technical dive. Must-read.