Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

Following something Vered wrote I googled for mother goddess and ran across Semiramis, a legendary Assyrian queen-ruler who has the misfortune to owe a lot of her google-juice to the tireless efforts of Jack Chick style Christians, promoting a 19th century anti-Catholic ( Read more... )

Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

In 1996 Keith Shafer, and several others proposed a solution to the problem of broken URLs. The link to this solution is now broken.

- The History of the URL: Path, Fragment, Query, and Auth / Zack Bloom

Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

Maybe we need to be more precise about what we call a “blessing”:

But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect ( Read more... )

Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

Cello converts electronic design specifications of combinational logic to complete DNA sequences encoding transcriptional logic circuits that can be executed in bacterial cells.

Source: CIDAR at Boston University - Cello

Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.


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Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

The FBI thought they were asking for a way to unlock a mobile phone, because the FBI is myopically focussed on past criminal investigations, not the future of the technology industry, and the FBI did not understand that they were actually asking for a way to tracelessly unlock ( Read more... )

Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

In Africa there are cultures we only catch glimpses into through their scam emails. In the classic “dearly beloved” example we learn that they are devoutly Christian and that corruption and sudden regime changes are commonplace their. The following example is poignant in its ( Read more... )

Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

So, you open a terminal, ssh to some server, start a long-running command and suddenly -
there’s a power cut / Moba or whatever program you are using dies / windows restarts

Is it all lost?
Well, yes. But there’s a way to avoid it:

use screen.

screen (aka GNU screen, for easier ( Read more... )

Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

In a recent dream there was a minimarket with a Jackie Chan theme; the manager had trained the staff to do various stunts while going about their work. In particular, he kept wanting them to do this thing where they would move on all fours with their hands and feet in pots.
“Walk ( Read more... )

Originally published at Distractions. Please leave any comments there.

So last time we played a superheroes game, it was suggested that the PCs protect their secret IDs by wearing hoodies and hooking up LEDs near their faces, because (I claimed) this will blind phone cameras.

Turns out this is an actual product, and it really doesn’t look very ( Read more... )