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/u/cfenollosa thanks for this list, it was very fun!
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epilys | link | | on The Ariane 5 rocket conserved enough fuel to potentially double the Webb telescope’s service life | source
I wonder if that robot refuel mission happens in 20 years and becomes the next "Webb telescope delayed again" topic in astronomy :D
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This is awesome. But damn, it makes firefox consume a lot of CPU and RAM, and makes my fan get loud.
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https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2700106
Our ability to form visual images within our mind is known as visual mental imagery and enables us to draw on internal representations in the absence of external stimuli. Aphantasia, a recent condition to gain attention within the field of visual neuroscience, describes the experience of individuals who lack voluntary visual mental imagery. The majority of research in this area has stemmed from subjective reports of visual imagery, through questionnaires such as the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ). More recently, a few studies have investigated impairments in cognitive function; however, these studies are limited in terms of the low sample size of aphantasic individuals used within the studies. As yet, no study has explored mental rotation (MR) performance in congenital aphantasics. Using the classic Shepard and Metzler MR paradigm, here we examine MR performance in 20 individuals with congenital aphantasia, as well as measuring self-reported visual object and spatial imagery through questionnaires (VVIQ, Spontaneous Use of Imagery Scale and Object-Spatial Imagery Questionnaire). We find that aphantasic participants self-report higher scores for visual spatial imagery compared to object imagery scores, which were below average of the object imagery scores reported by controls. Furthermore, in the MR test, aphantasic individuals took longer to rotate the stimuli compared to controls, and this time increased in line with the increased level of difficulty of rotation. Despite aphantasics taking longer to mentally rotate stimuli compared to controls, aphantasic participants were more accurate then control participants across all levels of difficulty. Our results indicate that aphantasics use a different strategy when performing the MR task, leading to slower reaction times but higher accuracy.
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He uses the rooms from super mario world to help memorize the sequences for solving the cubes.
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This is an absolute treasure. Thank you for sharing it.
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stibium | link | | on The weirdest book in the world just turned 40. We talked to its creator. | source
Is the Codex Gigas available online in a similar form as the Voynich Manuscript?
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Agreed! It's basically why I like the talk...everything has a bunch of historical context and shows how things go from theory to real-world applications and all the messy human-parts that had to go into making it possible.
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The marching cubes one is simply amazing... here you go from a bunch of 3D points into imaging the human body in 1987.
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What are some applications for this scale of integer multiplications? Statistical models?
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Oh totally. It started as a Tcl extension, and Tcl is famously loose with it's types...all data types can be treated as strings. I assume that's where that came from.
Hipp based semantics off an early version of Postgres, so there was a deliberate choice to loosen the type guarantees from what Postgres offered.
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sqlite3 is older than the current type system usage trends. There were strongly typed languages back then, but it was for niche/research uses. People wrote in C. That's why it provides those little helpers and it's not absolute about types. I bet if it was written with say, Ocaml it would be strongly typed from the get go.
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That's a nice way of looking at it...but I'd argue that if the intent is to be a "bag of bytes" you don't want to imply it's anything but that. Simultaneously if you want it to be typed, it seems less than ideal to have them front and center and then be wishy-washy with them.
I'm not a polemic, but I believe compromise on things like this corrupts conceptual clarity. Choosing one or the other would help learners quite a bit I'd think. I understand engineering tradeoffs are the enemy of such thoughts though.
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Oh cool! Thanks for digging in. It's always interesting to me how many "accidental features" there are lurking in code where every behavior isn't necessarily defined. In this case though, it was an explicit choice which is awesome.
On a side note, what an interesting formatting style. I don't read a ton of C, but choices on what brackets/parens require spaces and what ones don't seem almost opposite to what I'm used to. Easy enough to read still though.
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I want everything typed but I'm not a polemic. Sqlite has chosen to be a raw bytes database with some metadata and checks on top to help you type those bytes if you want. Application logic can have control over the data's type validity. Adding types to sqlite3 is just another layer of logic that might even duplicate effort.
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Let's scratch that itch!
In
src/build.c:1046the parser checks the validity of an object (table, index, view or trigger). Ifwritable_schema=ONit skips the error checks in theCREATE TABLEstatement. Dangerous but convenient. If the schema is corrupt, these checks wouldn't catch it. -
This is awesome! The loose type system is my main complaint about sqlite...I know it's a matter of opinion, but it always struck me as a really strange choice. I just like being confronted with errors as fast as humanly possible.
I wish there was some way to check how much code directly interfacing with sqlite before this was effectively asserts on the structure of what's returned.
All that being said, the arguments for the loose type system are linked from that article https://www.sqlite.org/flextypegood.html . They don't particularly move me, and their points seem to be ones that would more effectively be addressed in other ways. But again, I understand it's more of a project choice than something objectively good or bad.
Also, fun quote:
Because of a quirk in the SQL language parser, versions of SQLite prior to 3.37.0 can still read and write STRICT tables if they set "PRAGMA writable_schema=ON" immediately after opening the database file, prior to doing anything else that requires knowing the schema.
Currently working up the motivation to understand that quirk. Just kind of sounds like a fun random happenstance.
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epilys | link | | on The weirdest book in the world just turned 40. We talked to its creator. | source
Weirdest book contenders:
- Codex Gigas - aka The Devil's Bible
- The Voynich Manuscript which the book in the article is inspired from.
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Yeah! The fact that, as you say, is non-pathologized makes me feel a little bit better about myself.
Lately, I've been struggling with grinding on projects past the initial 'dopamine high' stage, and reading this reminded me that it's OK to not finish everything you start.
Thanks for sharing, glad you liked it!