ma2t

On the upside, this means you can run the LED boards without the rest of the CM-5. Have one panel that still works.

"A body at rest remains at rest until it looks down and realizes it has stepped off of a cliff."

Yes and no. When trying to show quantitative data in terms of areas or angles, then you are spot-on: same issues. But these plots, or chord diagrams more generally, are often used to show relationships (like translocations, inversions or duplications in genomes) in context of other landmarks. This use is common and less troublesome. A real problem with Circos plots is that it's so tempting to keep adding additional tracks of "information" that plots get ridiculous. It becomes like staring at the Voynich manuscript: uninterpretable but so compellingly pretty it must mean something.

"significantly lower level affair, on par of the other Star-something languages for the CM"

I'm not sure what this means. C* and CM Fortran weren't particularly low-level, unless C or Fortran 90 are "significantly low-level". For low-level fun, you'd drop to Paris (or to CMIS for "breathtakingly heart-stoppingly low-level").

For the curious, a great archive of documentation for stuff that actually shipped is here: https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/

One of the things I appreciate about HN is that discussions often acknowledges the pioneers. Way back in the early 1990s Eric Begleiter started Dimensional Foods to commercialize edible holographic technology. He gave a memorable demo at Thinking Machines Corp. where, in addition to rainbows from diffraction sheet molded foods, he showed some simple rendered 3D scenes floating in chocolate illuminated by a slide projector. Very impressive at the time when he broke off a chunk and ate it. The short-term idea was to give a rainbow sheen to breakfast cereals, but I think longer term there was talk of using holograms to distinguish and layer information on medicines. Made quite an impression at the time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150527050715/https://www.nytim...

Brain is among the top sites where NSCLC tumors tend to metastasize https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4251107

It's one of the 27 participating countries listed at the top of the page.

Thanks for this. On the updated video[0] there is an absolutely fascinating comment from a former McDonnell Douglas employee who worked with Maurice Ward and had first hand experience testing Starlite. Among other things, he states that it was actually a family of compounds formulated for specific applications and that "all that stuff about being a hairdresser was a red herring that [Maurice Ward] used to distract people from the fact that he'd spent years in the plastic recycling business," with polypropylene being incorporated into at least some Starlite formulations. Sounds like quite a character.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IbWampaEcM comment by grampsinsl5232

The complaints outline substantial profits that the scientists are alleged to have made as expert witnesses. All four are alleged to have made hundreds of dollars and hour, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, or more than $3 million over multi-decade careers. According to the linked complaint, at least two have profit sharing in Peninsula Pathology Associates through which some of this litigation work flows. On quick read, it's not clear how much of this is directly talc related or even what fraction is related to more general asbestos litigation though.

Recent studies suggest it's not just staying indoors or viruses hanging around longer in cold/dry air. Exposure to cold temperatures may suppress specific immune mechanisms in respiratory tract. See paper out this month, Huang et al "Cold exposure impairs extracellular vesicle swarm–mediated nasal antiviral immunity" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009167492...

Yes, Sanofi licensed from Kymab. There are a few groups targeting ICOS/ICOSL to modulate immune response to tumor (either alone or in combo with PD-1, CTLA-4, etc approaches previously mentioned on HN). Here's one reasonably recent backgrounder on rationale: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7003380/

Still not clear that KY1044 really is the "experimental drug" mentioned in the linked BBC article, since as others have noted the article is pretty thin on detail.

The article doesn't give details, but one of the quoted authors has participated in trials testing anti-ICOS antibody alone or in combination with atezolizumab, with results presented at an ASCO meeting: https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2021.39.15_suppl.26...

Describes one complete response in TNBC (and 4 partial responses in TNBC and other cancers). Couldn't find a related peer-reviewed journal article on very quick search.

I heard (but never saw) that for internal development at Connection Machines each developer had a single 512-processor board to work on.

From at least ~1989 on there were a bunch of machines of various sizes and states of assembly around the building at Thinking Machines. You'd connect to the appropriate front-end and cmattach whatever geometry needed. Certain groups did have dedicated CM-2s, particularly those needing specialized configurations (framebuffer, DataVault, etc).

If you knew where the machine running your code lived, you could go sit late at night and watch the LEDs throbbing. The machine really did have a presence.

That Y chromosome was added by applying same analysis workflow to a different biological source (CORIELL:NA24385, a NIST standard material used in the Genome in a Bottle project). The other chromosomes are all from the CHM13htert line (if you click on the individual chromosomes at your link above, you can scroll down to the "/isolate" feature to see what material the sequence was derived from). There's a long tradition of having a reference assembly be a combination of different individuals. Even the "standard" GRCh38/hg38 reference doesn't represent any single individual.

Basic evolutionary theory may argue that most of it is "junk" in the sense of being non-functional (even though some may be species-specific or under selection too weak or recent to be detectable). One paper that lays out this argument has title with the memorable beginning "On the Immortality of Television Sets." https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/5/3/578/583411

Has no male DNA (no Y chromosome), and is completely homozygous which simplified the assembly. https://web.expasy.org/cellosaurus/CVCL_VU12

The Atlantic article is based on a preprint of one of the papers now formally published in Science. They both describe the same T2T-CHM13 assembly.