Interesting stuff I came across last month:
- It’s now possible to create a stable plasma ring without all the magnets
“We were told by some colleagues this wasn’t even possible. But we can create a stable ring and maintain it for as long as we want, no vacuum or magnetic field or anything,” says co-author Francisco Pereira of the Marine Technology Research Institute in Italy, a visiting scholar at Caltech.
The stream of water is an 85-micron-diameter jet blasting from a specially designed nozzle at 9,000 pounds per square inch that strikes the crystal plate with an impact velocity of around 1,000 feet per second. For reference, that’s a stream narrower than a human hair moving about as fast as a bullet fired from a handgun.
- “Racket-on-Chez” (for those who care) is moving along nicely
- Once in a while, there’s a genuinely interesting paper on new CPU architectures
- To quote from the first sentence of this story, “The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be”
- Reducing the mysteriousness of fast radio bursts
- My pick in the ‘history’ and ‘collage’ category: old Soviet control rooms
- Probabilistic Programming is coming, might as well get used to it
- Not a question you’ve ever asked yourself, but if you wanted to know why “only half of Mars is magnetized”, here’s the answer.
- Machine learning from a programming language designer’s perspective
- Cool intro to PL theory basics
- Finally, a nice overview on programming paradigms
Abacus Noir 