2018 Science Limericks

"2018 in limericks: The highs and lows from the life sciences"

Hsieh Forbes Column: So You Got A Consumer DNA Test For Christmas -- Now What?

My latest Forbes piece: "So You Got A Consumer DNA Test For Christmas -- Now What?"

How The USPS Handles Bad Handwriting

"Have Bad Handwriting? The U.S. Postal Service Has Your Back"

15 Years Ago

Jon Erlichman:  Things that didn't exist on Christmas 15 years ago:

iPhone
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
Instagram
iPad
Netflix streaming
Google Maps
Snapchat
Spotify
Android
Uber
Lyft
Alexa
Airbnb
App Store
Google Chrome
WhatsApp
Fitbit
Waze
Slack
Square
Dropbox
Pinterest
Venmo
Bitcoin
Hulu
Kindle

FBI Interview

"Why Doesn’t the FBI Videotape Interviews?" (Via G.F.)

GPS Wars

"The GPS Wars Are Here"

AI Threats

"The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity"

Light Posting Notice

Admin note: Posting may be lighter than usual this week and next week because of the holiday season. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

New Largest Known Prime

"GIMPS Discovers Largest Known Prime Number: 2^82,589,933-1". (Via H.R.)

FedEx Christmas

"Inside FedEx’s Christmas Miracle". (Via H.R.)

A People's Guide to AI

"A People's Guide to AI". Free downloadable PDF.

Beautiful Bonsai

"Taikan Ten Exhibition 2018"

Saturn's Rings

"Saturn is losing its iconic planetary rings"

Machine Image Recognition

"How computers got shockingly good at recognizing images". (Via H.R.)

The Titanic And The Hunt For Two Nuclear Submarines

"The Story of the Titanic Keeps Getting Weirder"

Lab-Made Whiskey

"An Exclusive First Taste of Lab-Made Whiskey"

Laser-Powered Interstellar Probe

"Laser-Powered Probe Might Make It To Alpha Centauri In 100 Years"

Space Beer

"How To Make Beer With Only What You Can Grow On A Generation Ship"

Fake Faces

"These incredibly realistic fake faces show how algorithms can now mess with us"

Parrot Uses Alexa To Order Online Goods

"Parrot Uses Alexa to Order Watermelon, Lightbulbs While Owner Is Out"

536 Sucked

"Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive'"

Ant Colony Memories

"Ant Colonies Retain Memories That Outlast the Lifespans of Individuals"

Amazon Machine Learning Course

"The same machine learning courses Amazon uses internally to train their own engineers are being made available to all developers."

There are more than 30 self-service, self-paced digital courses with more than 45 hours of courses, videos, and labs for four key groups: developers, data scientists, data platform engineers, and business professionals. Each course starts with the fundamentals, and builds on those through real-world examples and labs, allowing developers to explore machine learning through some fun problems we have had to solve at Amazon. These include predicting gift wrapping eligibility, optimizing delivery routes, or predicting entertainment award nominations using data from IMDb (an Amazon subsidiary). Coursework helps consolidate best practices, and demonstrates how to get started on a range of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Comprehend.

Modern Dating

"Is Swiping Right On Tinder Considered Cheating?"

Tetris Trivia

Lots of info about Tetris.

AlphaFold Update

AlphaFold @ CASP13: "What just happened?"

Deep Learning Cheat Sheets

Deep Learning cheat sheets covering the content of the CS 230 class at Stanford. Could be useful to anyone interested in Deep Learning.

Lost Heart

"Southwest flight turns around after human heart is found on plane". (Via D.M.)

Decision-Making Heuristics

"Six science-backed techniques to help you make hard decisions"

"Avengers: Endgame" Trailer

Trailer for Avengers: Endgame

CoyoteVest

"Protect your dog from predator attacks with the CoyoteVest".

It looks like something an Oakland Raiders fan would wear, but with more cheerful colors. This is apparently a real consumer product.

Border Surveillance Update

"Border Agents Fail to Delete Personal Data of Travelers After Electronic Searches, Watchdog Says"

First Word Processor

NYT Obituary: "Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor"

Geminid Meteor Shower

"2018 Geminid Meteor Shower This Week May Be the Year's Best"

More AI Medicine

"Applying Deep Learning to Metastatic Breast Cancer Detection":

 In both datasets, LYNA was able to correctly distinguish a slide with metastatic cancer from a slide without cancer 99% of the time. Further, LYNA was able to accurately pinpoint the location of both cancers and other suspicious regions within each slide, some of which were too small to be consistently detected by pathologists. As such, we reasoned that one potential benefit of LYNA could be to highlight these areas of concern for pathologists to review and determine the final diagnosis...

Encouragingly, pathologists with LYNA assistance were more accurate than either unassisted pathologists or the LYNA algorithm itself, suggesting that people and algorithms can work together effectively to perform better than either alone. 

Christmas In Space

"Christmas Dinner Rocketed To International Space Station"

Mother of All Demos

"The Mother of All Demos turns 50":

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave a demo of NLS, the "oN-Line System", to the Fall Joint Computer Conference of the ACM and IEEE. Later dubbed The Mother of All Demos, it demonstrated many concepts that would later become fundamental elements of personal computing, including the mouse, windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, and word processing.

32-Legged Spherical Robot

"32-Legged Spherical Robot Moves Like an Amoeba". Click through to see video.

Unusual Blood Clot

"A blood clot formed in the exact shape of a man's lung passage -- then he coughed it up"

Quantum Insecurity

"Quantum computers pose a security threat that we're still totally unprepared for"

Self-Designing Machines

"Artificial Intelligence and the coming of the self-designing machine"

Apple ECG App

"ECG app and irregular heart rhythm notification available today on Apple Watch". (Via H.R.)

Cruise Vs. Motion Smoothing

"Tom Cruise is right: motion-smoothing sucks".

Cruise explains.

How People Ate In Medieval England

"How People Ate in Medieval England"

Toilet Paper Tablets

"EDC toilet paper in easy to carry tablets"

Phones And Their People

"The Ubiquity of Smartphones, as Captured by Photographers"

Food Photography Tricks

"Photography Tricks That Advertisers Use to Make Food Look Delicious".

I had heard of some of these, but others were new to me:

To make food look appetizing in advertisements, food stylists use a bunch of tricks that may not even involve edible objects. For example, syrup on pancakes is motor oil (because it doesn’t absorb), Elmer's glue is cereal milk (it prevent the cereal from sinking), shaving cream is whipped cream (doesn't melt), and dish soap helps the head on a beer appear foamier and last longer...

Control a Machine with Your Brain

"How to Control a Machine with Your Brain"

Against Book Blurbs

"We Need to Destroy the Blurbing Industrial Complex"

Good Book Design

"The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

Bad Airport Wi-Fi

"Airport Wi-Fi can be a security nightmare. Here's what you can do to stop cyber criminals"

Icosahedral Earth Puzzle

"An Infinite Icosahedral Puzzle of the Earth".

From the company blog:

The Earth Puzzle is a map of the globe unlike any you’ve seen before. Start anywhere and see where your journey takes you. This puzzle is based on an icosahedral map projection and has the topology of a sphere. This means it has no edges, no North and South, and no fixed shape. Try to get the landmasses together or see how the oceans are connected. Make your own maps of the earth!

Moore's Law Lives On

"New Metal-Air Transistor Replaces Semiconductors". (Via H.R.)

If People Acted Like Dogs

"8 Hilariously Accurate Comics That Show What Would Happen If People Acted Like Dogs"

AirBnb With Alpacas

"Welsh AirBnb Flaunts Alpacas as an Added Attraction for Guests"