HN user
Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside
https://groverlab.org
Fans of the band Wilco will recognize one of the Conet Project's recordings as the source of the woman repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" in the song "Poor Places" from the eponymous album. Wilco failed to license the sample and the resulting lawsuit gave the Conet Project a portion of Wilco's royalties on that track.
Yes! And every day the California Citrus State Historic Park is open for tours and tasting of various citrus varieties:
And I remember going to Radio Shack at the mall as a kid and wanting that Armatron robot so badly! Being able to get these things now for pretty cheap and fixing them and playing with them with my kids has been such a treat.
A parenting tip for those with geeky kids:
You can get some of these (like the smaller TOMY robots) for pretty cheap on eBay. They're usually broken, but the innards of these robots are so interesting, just taking them apart is a learning experience. TOMY was brilliant at making seemingly sophisticated toys that were actually run by a single DC motor; all the movements, sounds, sensing etc. were implemented using gears and cam shafts and other mechanisms. A great way to learn about simple machines, and a bonus if you (or your kid) can repair them and bring a 40-year-old robot back to life.
In the site's defense, it is emulating like ten different operating systems as you scroll.
Here's a cross-section through the theatre portion of the Barbican showing the complexity of the engineering:
https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/5w9ep7/cross_...
I'm guessing the title was meant to be a nod toward the meaning of the English word iota, "an extremely small amount".
Yup - the first few minutes of one of Technology Connections' videos on electromechanical pinball machines shows this mechanism in action:
Your post reminded me of Mark Twain’s very funny short story “The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm”:
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story...
Here's a Python script I wrote that generates storage bin labels and prints them using a cheap 2" by 3" label printer:
https://github.com/wgrover/jamie
The name 'jamie' is in honor of Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman's meticulously labeled storage bins at M5 Industries.
The code uses a brute-force search to fit the specified text on the label using the largest possible font size.
I miss Pine too. I could read/file/delete scores of plaintext emails in seconds using single keystrokes.
Every email client I've used since Pine has been better at dealing with all the stuff we've bolted on to email (HTML, attachments, calendar invites...) but none of them have been as efficient at the core tasks of email as Pine was.
Thanks for the suggestion - I looked into music recognition algorithms early on but struggled to adapt them for image use. But I'll revisit them.
Thanks! There are related structures in electronic circuits called physical unclonable functions (PUFs) that find uses in cryptography - you might find them interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function
Here's some work I did a couple years ago using some of these principles to fight counterfeit medicines: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4
A side note: I think there's an unmet need for algorithms that can convert photos of these random patterns into text (or something similar) that can be stored in a database and searched quickly for matching patterns. I've tried image similarity algorithms like the ones used by e.g. Google Reverse Image Search, but they seem poorly suited for this task. I ended up writing my own crude algorithm in the paper above that converts a pattern into a set of strings, and it works OK, but surely there are better ways to do this.
You might also find moiré-effect navigation beacons interesting, like the one that Tom Scott visits here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99_h30swtM
Can anyone recommend a backup strategy for iCloud? Specifically, my Macs' hard drives aren't big enough for any one computer to store everything locally, so some documents end up living only in iCloud which is clearly asking for trouble. My ideal solution would be to regularly mirror iCloud's contents on my NAS (which is big enough to store everything locally) but I've never seen anyone implement something like that.
I had the same thought. BTW, the movie is titled "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!" in the UK (same as the book it's based on). The studio changed the title for Americans [1], perhaps assuming we'd be less interested in a movie with scientists, shudder...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_w...
Random musings of a professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside. A few highlights:
- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2017-12-10-csu.html - My investigation into a fictitious California university and its link to predatory academic journals.
- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-19-gene-roddenberry-ucr... - Looking into filming locations for Gene Roddenberry's TV show pilot "Genesis II" that was filmed at UC Riverside in 1972.
- https://groverlab.org/hnbfpr/2019-08-06-stereo-records.html - How stereo phonograph records work.
https://www.simplify3d.com/3d-printing-the-curta-calculator-...
And a fun video of Adam Savage playing with Marcus Wu's 3D-printed Curta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9uRckJLqLk
Lovely work. Here's a similar project where I showed that randomly-placed multicolored candy particles (nonpareils) can be used to confirm the authenticity of pharmaceuticals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11234-4
Based on the title, I was expecting something quite different...
I suspect you're right, so we can assume that it was never all in one piece or we would have known about it!
For a sense of scale, 93 kg of uranium would occupy a space a little smaller than one soccer ball: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+93+kg+of+ura...
Ah, good point. I was imagining office waste like paper, but if you're putting in kitchen scraps and dirty diapers, ignore my suggestion...
One request - after you toss in the garbage and the lid closes, make it "chew" for a couple seconds by rapidly opening/closing the lid over a small distance!
This isn't a chip for implanting inside the body; this is a microfluidic chip that replicates some body systems in the laboratory.
Here's a (pre-repair) photo of those energy dissipator blocks at the bottom of the spillway, including people for scale:
http://media.fishreports.com/reports/img-20170303-78a7bb40.j...
Hard to comprehend how massive those blocks are...
Note that this is just an excerpt from a whole book on this topic, "The Plutonium Files" by Eileen Welsome. It's a riveting and disturbing read.
Looks like data for the various songs here:
https://gist.github.com/1wErt3r/4048722#file-smbdis-asm-L160...
I'd love to see the process of extracting actual audio from that.