math
- Southwest Airlines has just banned “human-like” or “animal-like” robots from its flights. Oh—and in checked baggage too. The concern is about biggish lithium-ion batteries, which does make sense. There’s also the issue of whether robots are considered passengers, checked baggage, or carry-on baggage that carries itself on.
- Interesting long-form piece about archaic homo sapiens, a genetic group close enough to modern humans to share a species name, but different enough to trace their rise and fall and eventual extinction. Modern humans carry some juvenile traits into adulthood, like friendliness, playfulness, curiosity and flexibility, in a similar way that our modern dogs carry puppy traits like playfulness and cuddliness into adulthood. Dogs are lifelong wolf puppies, and we’re lifelong cave-kids.
- Beef is not the big health risk that Certain Influencers have long been yelping about. Well, we’ve known that for a long time. Eggs are good for you too. As are protein and fat. The arguments will continue as arguments generally do.
- Keeping lithium-ion batteries on charge even after they hit 100% shortens the life of the batteries. I knew this, and don’t keep my phone or tablets on charge after they hit 100%, which I check for from time to time.
- Duke University scientists have created a 20-legged robot that merrily rolls along the Duke campus. Watch the videos; I’m a long-time robot fan and I think they’re cool.
- And if creating 20-legged robots isn’t your thing, consider scientists at ETH Zurich who have created (theoretically) perfect randomness using two superconducting chips cooled almost to absolute zero and connected to each other by a 30-meter long tube similarly cooled. I don’t quite understand it either (how do you prove a number is perfectly random?) but I have a hunch you could sell perfect random numbers generated with such a device and make a good buck. We’ll see.
- USB-C cables and ports can do a lot more than just charge your phone or tablet. Here are a few such things worth keeping in the back of your head.
- Well, this certainly wasn’t on my bingo card: A humanoid robot fashion show, where the robots and their, um, fashion models wear the same clothes on the runway.
- Here’s a map of America’s favorite house paint color—along with some discussion on when and why vivid colors fled from everyday American life. I remember when cars were all kinds of colors. The kitchen I grew up in was hot pink for a fair number of years—and then bright blue. Sure, all that was (many) years ago. Multiple colors increase costs for just about any product line. Shame, that—but a pretty solid explanation. (h/t to Rich Rostrom for the link.)
- I meant to post this back in May but the item went into a notefile while I was traveling and got misplaced: Larry O’Brien did a very nice detailed comparative review of my Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition and Randy Hyde’s Art of Assembly Language, Second Edition over at SDTimes. Larry understands better than most people that there are multiple ways to approach learning a topic, and that both books have value and don’t completely overlap one another.
- Another tardy item from that same missing notefile: Scientific American must be desperate for subscribers, as it had the courage to challenge the biggest sacred cow in medical science: the Fat Bad, Carbs Good nonsense that has blown us up like carnival ballooms since it was declared health dogma in the early 1970s.
- Part of the problem: Most medical studies are utter crap, and here’s why.
- And here’s an excellent example. Sadness makes me neither creative nor energetic. Furthermore, all the most creative people I know are borderline manic. Insane, maybe. Sad? Not in the least.
- In 1970, I built a vertex-first projection model of the 600-cell regular polytope in four space using D-stix. My senior-year math teacher hung the model from the steam pipes and I never saw it again, but here’s a photo of one made out of ordinary drinking straws. (Scroll down.)
- What is the frequency of a dog shaking water off its fur? The answer: greater than or equal to 4 Hz.
- Slate asked “Is the movie that almost killed Disney animation really that bad?” My answer: Yes. It’s the Seventies car in Disney’s otherwise reasonable animation garage, full of uninteresting things indifferently drawn, with the possible exception of the weird half-dog, half-leprechaun whatchamacallit Gurgi. The Horned King is the least menacing of all Disney cartoon villains, and certainly can’t hold a candle to Maleficent, Hades, or even Gaston. The Chronicales of Prydain is a decent kid-series, and deserves a remake.
