Interesting stuff from the past month:
- Beginning with this headline, from the BBC: ”‘Big void’ identified in Khufu’s Great Pyramid at Giza”
- I don’t honestly think there’s a “way back” to the “old web”, but I do sympathize with anyone who misses it.
- Exploring the possibilities of computational assistance in mathematical exploration (a long and ongoing journey …)
- It’s hard to make really big telescopes
- I usually like papers and talks by Nada Amin, and if you do too: ”Collapsing towers of interpreters”
- The surprising story behind the Apple II operating system
- Max Tegmark (he of the “Our Mathematical Universe” book) weighs in further on the need to stop asking about the meaning of things, and to just ”Shut up and calculate” (somehow, I don’t think people are going to stop asking about the meaning of things …)
- Cryptocurrency can sometimes just “vanish”
- Quantum mechanics seems to underlie everything, from our sense of smell to photosynthesis.
- A lot (if not all) cool old tech keeps getting forgotten, so it’s worth remembering Oberon
- A nice “blast from the past” (1985 !) piece of technical history, useful as a check against the kind of hubris that we see routinely: ”Microsoft has it all – almost”
- A “rocky, 400-m long, cigar-shaped object” (!) entered our solar system and is now on its way out.
- It might seem hard to believe now, but just 35 years ago UCLA had a “parapsychology lab”.
- On the “old tech nostalgia” theme, if you first encountered the internet in the early-to-mid 90s, you might recall Gopher: “Remembering the web that wasn’t” (I was nostalgic enough to push a related pic as the cover image for this blog post).
- As another Emacs user who uses Eshell heavily, happy to recommend this slightly-evangelical piece on it.
- Cold-war tech time! Soviet subs were able to track American ones, in the limited sense of trailing them, without sonar.
Abacus Noir 