CRB

The complexity of the human brain and its functions in a neat infographic map [zoomable version: buff.ly/3P0dzPz]

How to build a thriving open source community by writing code like bacteria do 🦠. Bacterial code (genomes) are: - small (each line of code costs energy) - modular (organized into groups of swappable operons) - self-contained (easily "copy paste-able" via horizontal gene transfer) If chunks of code are small, modular, self-contained and trivial to copy-and-paste, the community can thrive via horizontal gene transfer. For any function (gene) or class (operon) that you write: can you imagine someone going "yoink" without knowing the rest of your code or having to import anything new, to gain a benefit? Could your code be a trending GitHub gist? This coding style guide has allowed bacteria to colonize every ecological nook from cold to hot to acidic or alkaline in the depths of the Earth and the vacuum of space, along with an insane diversity of carbon anabolism, energy metabolism, etc. It excels at rapid prototyping but... it can't build complex life. By comparison, the eukaryotic genome is a significantly larger, more complex, organized and coupled monorepo. Significantly less inventive but necessary for complex life - for building entire organs and coordinating their activity. With our advantage of intelligent design, it should possible to take advantage of both. Build a eukaryotic monorepo backbone if you have to, but maximize bacterial DNA.

Weird, subtle, surprising, and deadly code that has changed our world: slate.com/technology/201…

You never know what you’ll see looking back from the cracks. hakaimagazine.com/news/stone-wal…

Seeing the World through Your Eyes paper page: huggingface.co/papers/2306.09… The reflective nature of the human eye is an underappreciated source of information about what the world around us looks like. By imaging the eyes of a moving person, we can collect multiple views of a scene outside the camera's direct line of sight through the reflections in the eyes. In this paper, we reconstruct a 3D scene beyond the camera's line of sight using portrait images containing eye reflections. This task is challenging due to 1) the difficulty of accurately estimating eye poses and 2) the entangled appearance of the eye iris and the scene reflections. Our method jointly refines the cornea poses, the radiance field depicting the scene, and the observer's eye iris texture. We further propose a simple regularization prior on the iris texture pattern to improve reconstruction quality. Through various experiments on synthetic and real-world captures featuring people with varied eye colors, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to recover 3D scenes using eye reflections.

The number of finger joints on each hand (excluding the thumb) makes it possible to count to 12 by using the thumb. Egyptians and Babylonians were fond of counting in base twelve like this and this is why we have 24 hours in a day & 60 minutes in an hour ow.ly/H8jE30ndX0q

In PostgreSQL, powerful Full Text Search is available out of the box admcpr.com/postgres-full-…

The letters "ough" can be pronounced at least 8 different ways in English. How did that happen?!

Wow.

Students don't need a perfect teacher. Students need a happy teacher, who's gonna make them excited to come to school and grow a love for learning.

In 2009, the Institute for Highway Safety staged a head on crash between a 2009 Chevy Malibu and a 1959 Bel Air. The same crash that would have instantly killed someone in 1959 causes a few light injuries today.

🧵Conclusion🧵 If democracy is to survive and thrive, we must be deeply intentional about the algorithms that mediate our communication. Engagement-based ranking isn't working for us.😠 Bridging-based ranking can help.🌉 Read the full report here ⤵️ belfercenter.org/publication/br…

This is a national tragedy... khn.org/news/article/c…

Mandatory online modules twitter.com/Yoda4ever/stat…

“Functional fixedness” describes our tendency to see objects only in the way in which they’re traditionally used. hbr.org/2015/12/find-i…

"Education isn't something you can finish." -- Isaac Asimov

Dear @nytimes photo editor: Huge fan here. But when you post pic of a guy grimacing while getting his vaccine (when shot actually feels like a pin prick), at least consider fact that 1000s may see this as reason to not get vaccinated. Some will die from that decision. Thanks.

Amazing.