Interesting Links for 25-07-2015

[andrewducker]

• An Ingenious Shower Liner With Inflatable Spikes That Force a Person Out of the Shower After Four Minutes
  • (tags: water cleanliness design environment )
• Modder gets Half-Life running on an Android smartwatch
  • (tags: half-life valve android )
• Genetically Engineered Beluga Whales Are Attacking Christian Families with Homosexual Chemtrail Water at

Comments

[snarlish]

Carrotnet? Clarrotnet? Clarinot?

Anyway, best Tedx talk ever.

[alitheapipkin]

That 25 ways To Dress... article is somewhat undersold by its title - I'm actually pretty interested in peoples' personal style but the insights about working in tech are much more interesting and chimed with my experience nicely.

[andrewducker]

I agree - probably of use to anyone trying to show how diverse tech is.

[agoodwinsmith]

Rain forest cultivation - why is this news? This evidence was coming out in the early eighties - I quoted some new study in one of my papers then. And even then, the previous opinion was that agriculture had occurred extensively, but had been slash and burn, and this evidence showed old silted-up irrigation canals all over the place. The eighties, man.

[makyo]

Terry Tao is a fascinating and extraordinarily clever person. (Also, by all accounts, a nice and very down-to-earth chap.) We had a panel discussion about Fields medallists at Loncon last August (a few days after one of the professors in my department had joined that rarefied and elite bunch). Ian Stewart, not exactly an academic lightweight himself, said that a physicist friend once told him that most serious academic physicists reckon that a Nobel Prize is something they can legitimately aspire to: it's theoretically within their reach if they work really hard, choose the right topic, are lucky with how their experiments turn out, and if they get sufficient support and funding. In contrast, almost every academic mathematician knows that we're never going to get a Fields Medal. The people who do are invariably astonishingly clever (their brains seem to be able to work on a higher level than the rest of us) and also extraordinarily productive. Of the latest four medallists, one also plays tablas to a high professional standard, and

[andrewducker]

Yeah, people like Tao really do make me believe in innate intelligence*, because they frequently do amazing things from a very young age, and seem to think so very differently when it comes to mathematics.

*At least when it comes to maths,