via 3 Quarks Daily: Lisa Zyga in Phys.org
Structure of the neuron transistor, which contains a 2D flake of MoS2. Credit: S. G. Hu et al. ©2017 IOP Publishing
Researchers have built a new type of "neuron transistor" – a transistor that behaves like a neuron in a living brain. These devices could form the building blocks of neuromorphic hardware that may offer unprecedented computational capabilities, such as learning and adaptation.
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via OUP Blog by Edward Whitley
“Books” by Syd Wachs. CC0 Public Domain via Unsplash.
One of the most enduring (if not most entertaining) games that Walt Whitman scholars like to play begins with a single question: Where did Leaves of Grass come from?
Before Whitman released the first edition of his now-iconic book of poetry in 1855, he had published only a handful of rather conventional poems in local newspapers, which makes it seem as if the groundbreaking free-verse form in Leaves of Grass appeared virtually out of nowhere. Ralph Waldo Emerson was first to play the game of pondering the origin of poems such as “Song of Myself” when he wrote a letter to Whitman mere weeks after the initial publication of Leaves of Grass in the summer of 1855. “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he wrote, “which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.” Whitman published an open-letter reply to Emerson the following year that conveniently neglected to identify a foreground of any sort that would account for what Emerson had called “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
NSA whistleblower Reality Winner may have been caught thanks to a hidden pattern of dots that color printers bury in every page they print, as an assistance to law enforcement agencies.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Michael Dirda at The Washington Post
During the first half of his writing career, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) imagined a machine that would travel through time, the fearsome tripods of Martian invaders, a moon rocket powered by Cavorite, the military tank (in the short story “The Land Ironclads”) and other engineering marvels. But, as Jeremy Withers’s “The War of the Wheels” reminds us, the father of science fiction was also fascinated by the bicycle.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Smoke-filled bubbles fall like fruits from an otherworldly tree in this beautiful installation titled New Spring.
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via CoolTools by KK
The best size for homes
Don’t build a tiny home, build a small home. Fashionable tiny homes can be more aspirational than realistic. Ditto for large homes. A small home (400-1200 sqft) is the better size for most folks. In this book, shelter maven Lloyd Kahn collects home ideas for small homes that are built by the owners, or at least designed by the owners. The small size of the homes featured here encourage hand-made details that you could not complete in large home. Hand made everything is only one benefit of a small home; others include affordability, low ecological footprint, low maintenance, etc. The overall message in this gallery of hundreds of hand-built small homes is that small homes can be incredibly beautiful, adequately spacious, potentially affordable, and in most ways preferable to a large home.
Continue reading and see some interesting ideas. Probably not viable in the UK but one can wish!
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Omar Ali in Brown Pundits
The debate about the origins of the “Aryans” and their arrival in India has flared up again, this time triggered by new genetic findings that appear to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that large numbers of Indo-Europeans herders migrated into the Indian subcontinent about 4000 or so years ago. Razib Khan (one of the best informed and unbiased bloggers on this topic) has written in detail about this topic in several posts, the most recent of which is here. I am not going to go into the genetics or the details, I just wanted to recap the story in very simple layperson outline and focus mostly on some of the politics around this topic. My basic argument is that the Hindutvadi reaction to the political uses of “Aryan Invasion Theory” is relatively justified, but opting to take a stand against population genetics and common sense in the form of a relatively recently concocted (and very unlikely) “Out of India” (OIT) theory is an unfortunate and self-defeating mistake.
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via Interesting Literature
Are these the greatest ever detective novels?
It’s impossible to boil down such a rich and fertile genre as detective fiction to just ten definitive classic novels, so the following list should not be viewed as the ten best detective novels ever written so much as ten classic detective novels to act as great ‘ways in’ to this popular genre of fiction. We’ve tried to allow due coverage to the golden age of detective fiction in the early- to mid-twentieth century, but have also thrown in some earlier, formative classics as well. We’ve avoided spoilers in the summaries of the novels we’ve provided, and have instead chosen to focus on the most curious or interesting aspects of those novels.
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Rome metro excavations unearth 3rd-century ‘Pompeii-like scene’
via the Guardian by Associated Press in Rome
The dog skeleton discovered during earthworks for Rome’s new Metro C line.
Photograph: AP
Digging for Rome’s new underground network has unearthed the charred ruins of an early 3rd-century building and the 1,800-year-old skeleton of a crouching dog that apparently perished in the same blaze that caused the structure to collapse.
Archaeologists said on Monday that they had made the discovery on 23 May while examining a 10-metre (33-foot) hole bored near the city’s ancient Aurelian walls as part of construction work for the Metro C line.
The culture ministry described the finds as “A Pompeii-like scene” evoking comparisons with the inhabitants trapped by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD preserved where they died in its ashes.
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via Interesting Literature
Classic book titles that allude to other literary works
Everyone knows that Aldous Huxley ‘borrowed’ the title of his best-known novel Brave New World from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Similarly, it’s well-known that Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls takes its title from a sermon by John Donne. But sometimes a famous book title can hide a surprising allusion to another, perhaps less well-known, work of literature. Here are ten of our favourites. How many of these titles did you know owed their existence to another literary work?
I am not sure that everyone does know but it was an interesting selection.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
YouTuber Latheman demonstrates a nicely-designed V2 Stirling engine powered by two spirit lamps. Impressively smooth action on this beauty!
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