Apple is way ahead of the pack, but even the losers at Oracle are making $279 a second. The original graphic , by Pablo Gomez , is interactive and a must-see.
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Apple makes $1,445 a second
Apple is way ahead of the pack, but even the losers at Oracle are making $279 a second. The original graphic , by Pablo Gomez , is interactive and a must-see.
Continued here:
Apple makes $1,445 a second
The announcement is more than a year old, but Dan Brown, of The Da Vinci Code fame, is paying €300,000 to have Amsterdam’s Ritman Library digitize thousands of books about “alchemy, astrology, magic and theosophy.” One particularly important text that will be digitized is the first English translation of the works of Jakob Böhme, a 17th-century German mystic. Says Esther Ritman, the library’s director and librarian, “When I show this book in the library, it’s like traveling in an entire new world.” Once the work is available online, she says, “We can take everyone along the journey of this book digitally.” The last update was a while back, though, with no updates. Previously: New documentary is a magic portal into a weird and wonderful library
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Occult manuscripts to be digitized and posted online
Probably the best cyberpunk anime ad for stout ale in the world. [via Tim Soret ]
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Cyberpunk anime ad for Murphy’s Irish Stout (UK, 1997)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUySE5moIFI Nothing evokes yuletide wonder quite like huddling around a modern Christmas family classic such as Die Hard or Eyes Wide Shut . But did you know that there are christmas movies more than a century old? Keep the holiday flame going through Boxing Day with the Nitrate Diva’s pick of ten pre-1918 xmas films. Embedded above is James Williamson’s joyous and celebratory 1902 The Little Match Seller , just a few minutes long.
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Christmas movies from before 1918
How long does it take, from keypress to the letter appearing on-screen, in a basic terminal window? My Core i7 PC with a GTX 1070 video card and 32gb of RAM might — might — be about as fast as 35-year-old Apple IIe. And almost nothing else is. It seems that modern computers are so complex that there are just some things they can’t do quickly . Compared to a modern computer that’s not the latest ipad pro, the apple 2 has significant advantages on both the input and the output, and it also has an advantage between the input and the output for all but the most carefully written code since the apple 2 doesn’t have to deal with context switches, buffers involved in handoffs between different processes, etc. On the input, if we look at modern keyboards, it’s common to see them scan their inputs at 100 Hz to 200 Hz (e.g., the ergodox claims to scan at 167 Hz). By comparison, the apple 2e effectively scans at 556 Hz. …If we look at the other end of the pipeline, the display, we can also find latency bloat there. I have a display that advertises 1 ms switching on the box, but if we look at how long it takes for the display to actually show a character from when you can first see the trace of it on the screen until the character is solid, it can easily be 10 ms. You can even see this effect with some high-refresh-rate displays that are sold on their allegedly good latency. Only one modern machine, doing one task, can keep up with the Apple IIe’s keyboard latency: a second-gen iPad Pro’s pencil input. Nothing else (including the iPad Pro’s own keyboard) hits 30ms. I had my own agonizing tangle with this problem. My favorite writing app, WriteRoom, is so laggy on my 12″ MacBook that I just don’t bother: an earlier version still shoots fast as lightning on a 2000s-vintage Snow Leopard iMac. Somewhere between Snow Leopard and Yosemite, between Core Duo and Core m3, between WriteRoom 2 and the most post-Lion versions, so much more horsepower is required draw words on the screen that a contemporary Mac is visibly slower than a decade-old one.
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Latency: why typing on old computers just feels better
https://twitter.com/philipmould/status/927542755500359680 Art dealer and BBC presenter Philip Mould posted this video showing restoration work on a centuries-old painting . It’s more vigorous than you might expect: a solvent tailored to the varnish but safe for the paint, and the resulting slimy mix simply wiped off to reveal surprisingly clear, vibrant color. Mould hasn’t shared the secrets of what method is being used. Turpentine is sometimes used with another solvent, but that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening here. No matter what method is employed, it takes a good deal of skill to remove the varnish and not have any impact on the actual painting underneath. Details about the featured painting aren’t abundant. Mould later clarified that the “woman in red” is 36 years-old and was painted in 1618, according to an inscription. Below is a digital restoration of the Mona Lisa . The varnish and paint are reportedly too chemically similar to attempt the job with current techniques.
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What’s under the yellowed crust of varnish on renaissance paintings
NASA’s Sean Doran posted a new set of Jupiter shots imaged by the Juno probe , and they’re stunning: “What a blimmin’ gorgeous/diabolical planet. Smörgåsbord”
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Juno’s beautiful new images of Jupiter
A new scanning technique has revealed what scientists believe is an empty space within the Great Pyramid at Gizeh . While it might be an architectural feature intended to limit the load upon the hallway beneath it, it could be a huge room. They also detected a smaller void at a different spot in the pyramid. “We don’t know whether this big void is horizontal or inclined; we don’t know if this void is made by one structure or several successive structures,” explained Mehdi Tayoubi from the HIP Institute, Paris. “What we are sure about is that this big void is there; that it is impressive; and that it was not expected as far as I know by any sort of theory.” … Much of the uncertainty comes down to the rather imprecise data gained from muography. This non-invasive technique has been developed over the past 50 years to probe the interiors of phenomena as diverse as volcanoes and glaciers. It has even been used to investigate the failed nuclear reactors at Fukushima.
It’s generally recognized that The Simpsons drifted from sharp comedy to cosy light entertainment as the years went by, and that a threshold was passed somewhere between seasons eight and eleven. Using data culled from IMDB and a contiguous cluster analysis, Nathan Cunn pinpoints the exact end of The Simpsons’ golden age to the half-hour: episode 11 of season 10 . This particular way of seeing things condemns no particular episode’s sins, merely putting a statistical dividing point between Wild Barts Can’t Be Broken and Sunday Cruddy Sunday . Compare to The Principal and the Pauper , the season 9 episode traditionally identified as the shark-jumper, which in this chart is a controversial blip on the road to all the disengaged meta to come. It’s remarkable that the show managed to go for over nine seasons, and over 200 episodes, with an average rating of 8.2. The latter seasons, in contrast, have an average rating of 6.9, with only three episodes in the latter 400+ episodes achieving a rating higher than the average golden age episode—those episodes being Trilogy of Error, Holidays of Futured Passed, and Barthood. Given that the ratings approximately follow a Gaussian distribution, we expect (and, indeed, observe) that roughly half of the golden age episodes exceeded this mean value. Although The Simpsons isn’t quite the show it once was, the decline in the show’s latter seasons is more testament to the impossibly high standards set by the earlier seasons than it is an indictment of what the show became. Nonetheless, the author also posits that further declines in standards may be masked after a certain point by survivorship bias : votes coming only from fans whose perception of quality won’t change so long as the quantity remains. On the other hand, internet ratings are not the be-all and end-all of America’s collective critical faculties, either.
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Cluster analysis shows that the golden age of The Simpsons ended in Season 10
Reddit embarked on a purge of violence-advocating content today , the targets generally being Nazis and their friends, but also at least one animal abuse subreddit and one targeting white people. The newly banned and removed pages include r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/whitesarecriminals and r/far_right. Reddit’s new policy says: “Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people.”
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Reddit rids itself of Nazi subreddits