A Series of Tubes

"Many of these terms were in common use into the 20th century."

I hear many of these terms in common usage today, like potash, tartar, spirits, soda/soda ash, lime, soda lime, slacked lime, quicklime, lye, alkali, caustic soda, caustic potash, caustic alkali, quicksilver, chalk, cinnabar, fools gold, fulminating silver, fulminating gold, gypsum, vitriol has taken on a less specific meaning, aqua regia, turpentines, lead sugar, sulfur.

I think the reason that so many of these terms are retained is that the substances they refer to have been known for thousands of years in some cases.

brimstone is a much cooler name for sulfur that should be brought back. aqua vitae is a nice name for ethanol. the names of metals haven't changed.

A nice trip up and down the scale of things. I especially like the ones from 10^1 to 10^14, inhumane numbers attempting to be brought to a human scale.

Source: CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulas (Zwillinger, Daniel) (Z-Library)

Figs and fig wasps have a tightly coordinated reproductive cycle, and have been cospeciating for 70 to 90 million years. The pollination of figs is accomplished in an internal cavity only accessible to a specific species of wasp. The wasp enters through an opening that is only just large enough for it to get through, loosing it's wings and antenna in the process. Pollen on the wasp pollinate the fig's internal flowers, and the wasp lays it's eggs in some of the flowers before dying there. When the male wasps hatch, they fertilize the unhatched females, and burrow tunnels out of the fig before also dying inside it. When the females hatch, they exit the fig through the tunnels, taking pollen with them to search for a fig within which to lay their eggs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syconium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fig_wasp

A very good introduction to shader programming, goes through all the basics and offers lots of tools to help get you started. Get out there a program a shader.

Reconstruction of auditory stimulus from intracranial electroencephalograms.

Cool diagram from the paper:

Here's a phys.org write up of it also, with the audio easy to listen to.

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-brain-patients-scientists-reconstruct-pink.amp

sourced from https://lemmy.ml/post/3589646

Some very strange ways some people have apparently died.

Some of my favorites:

11 September 1063: Béla I of Hungary, when the Holy Roman Empire decided to launch a military expedition against Hungary to restore young Solomon to the throne, was seriously injured when "his throne broke beneath him" in his manor at Dömös.[68] The king—who was "half-dead", according to the Illuminated Chronicle—was taken to the western borders of his kingdom, where he died at the creek Kanizsa on 11 September 1063.[69][70]

9 March 2001: Bernd Jürgen Brandes was voluntarily slaughtered and eaten by Armin Meiwes, following an appointment via internet. At his request, Meiwes first amputated his penis and they unsuccessfully tried to eat it. Meiwes taped the entire amputation and killing, and conserved and ate Brandes' meat. Meiwes was eventually arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Meiwes became a vegetarian during his prison sentence.

Yandex software source code leak examined, and some history about the companies relationship to the Russian government. An interesting look at what goes on under the hood of a big data advertising business like Google.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/1680842

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/1680837

I feel it's relevant, because of it confirming the possibility of "big tech" spying and cooperating with 3-letter agencies.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4807979

Source: AKAT-1 Analogue Computer (by Bethany Fox - ArtStation):

An iconic Polish analog computer from the 60s made for my friends' awesome FMP set in a dystopian fascist museum
Authored at 4k. Has a clear screen that isn't shown in Painter since it displays opaque.

The post only says "Reference picture", but I think it's the one at "Muzeum Techniki" in Warsaw, Poland:
https://flickr.com/photos/mwichary/2231616877/in/album-72157603823734926/

More pictures from the museum on Marcin Wichary's Flickr album:
https://flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72157603823734926/

Some info from Jacek Karpiński's Wikipedia:

The breakthrough achievement of Karpiński's career was the construction of AKAT-1 in 1959 in co-operation with engineer Janusz Tomaszewski. AKAT-1 was a pioneering work – the world's first differential equations analyzer based on transistors. Karpiński built the device during his spell at the Polish Academy of Science's Institute of Automatics, where he found employment after the success of AAH. The aim of AKAT-1 was to simulate various complex dynamic processes like heat transfer or a shock absorber's mechanics. The innovativeness of the device was acknowledged by historians of computer science – e.g. Maciej Sysło claims it has to be conceded that Karpiński's effort preceded any other similar device. The construction was also lauded for its aesthetical merits – the panel designed by leading Polish artists – Emil Cieślar, Olgierd Rutkowski, Stanisław Siemek and Andrzej Wróblewski had been considered to 'innovatively merge all functions in a congruent and attractive form that anticipated the future trends'. The machine has been domestically welcomed warmly, having been covered by a host of country-wide media, including national television TVP1 and Polish Film Chronicle.

A model of gene regulatory networks using the mathematical model for recurrent neural nets from computer science. It's such a great way to describe how a cell 'knows' things. every single celled organism or cell in a body contains within a complex information processing chemical network of gene-regulating proteins. One way to think of it is that every individual cell integrates information like a neural network. Good read, there are newer papers on this subject, but I'm not sure if there are better ones.

Really great description of the american sprawl. These issues eat away my soul every single day, and this guy wrote about it in 1973.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

The invention of the personal automobile, and destruction of public transportation, was a triumph of capitalist drug-peddling; suddenly, all at once, everyone’s personal mobility became dependent on a single, new commodity, gasoline. Without it, we are unable to function, since urban sprawl and suburbanization now means we can’t even walk to work if we wanted to.

“The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”

You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them.

These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/1364150

It was a well thought out and organized description of advertising, as a form of information transmission and a form of propaganda from someone working in the industry.

The simplest and fairly well thought out idea behind OceanGate's failure. With demos!

A sort of museum style tour of some jet engine compressors at a repair shop.

A well organized description of how a GriGri works, and when it fails. Based on good physics, not a lot of math in the video itself.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1167257

A good recent video from Hard is Easy on the GriGri belay device

Using florescent markers, the researchers are able to track pairs of DNA loci in 3D, showing the interaction between distantly spaced parts of the genome. Implications in gene expression as enhancers and promoters for genes may be very far away from said gene.

Paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf5568

Sadly no SciHub :( https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adf5568

secure DM if you want the paper.

An interesting paper describing a eukaryote native RNA-guided endonuclease, like CRISPR. Seems less efficient at the moment, but it the scientific community gets behind it and starts developing the methods, it may superseded the efficacy of CRISPR in eukaryotic cells.

The Paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06356-2

(unfortunately not available on SciHub https://sci-hub.st/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06356-2 )

If you want a copy of the paper, secure DM (matrix).

Pretty neat mini series about aluminum tube fixturing and welding used to build a custom cargo bike.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/573825

Yeah I know he has hundreds of thousands euro of equipment

https://youtu.be/Ie3uTHq4LSE

This is a really great course, taking you from a beginner in neuro-science, to a high level. It's probably worth having some background in biology, but the first few chapters do give a very brief review of some relevant topics, like genetic techniques. I haven't finished reading it yet, but I find myself picking it up all the time.

Pre-print describing their project to map out every connection in the adult Drosophila brain, parsed by AI and reviewed by experts. They also link to the viewer https://flywire.ai/ Which is openly accesable and can be used to explore the fly brain.

WEHImovies and a playlist of interesting molecular-biological animations. Evolutionary selection operates int the realm chemistry and physics, and these videos offer a fantastic insight into that relationship.

Succinct intuitive introduction to antenna theory.

Description of the Nuremberg trials, a direct account.

Fun demos of CRTs with a brief explanation of the purpose of the different grids.