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The world’s littlest laptop is yours for $399, but is it the ultimate writers’ gadget?

The GPD Pocket is a wee laptop with a 7″ high-dpi touchscreen display and an enticing $399 price tag. It’ll be light on power, with an Intel Atom CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, but promises about 12 hours on a charge and two USB ports, one of them type C. There’s a ThinkBook-style tracknipple in lieu of a trackpad. It’ll run Ubuntu or Windows 10 and, somehow, they managed to sneak a headphone jack on there. (more…)

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The world’s littlest laptop is yours for $399, but is it the ultimate writers’ gadget?

Assassin of Korean dictator’s brother wore LOL shirt

One of the two women suspected of assassinating Kim Jong-un’s brother wore a shirt with “LOL” written on it. CCTV images released by Malaysian authorities show the suspects lurking in Kuala Lumpur airport; reports variously have them using needles or a spray to poison Kim Jong-nam, who died en-route to hospital. In a scene out of a James Bond film, the toxic spray-wielding femme fatales targeted 45-year-old Jong Nam – the globetrotting black sheep of his North Korean ruling class family — in the airport’s departure hall on Monday morning. The women – believed to be North Korean agents – unleashed the noxious fumes in the face of Jong Nam as he waited for a flight to Macau, China. Jong Nam staggered to a receptionist, indicating that he was on the verge of passing out and suffering a mild seizure, police said. Nam would be running the hermit kingdom but for several embarrassing episodes (such as being arrested trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland on a false passport) that saw his younger brother rise in their now-dead father’s eyes. Assassin targeting Kim Jong Un’s half-brother wore ‘LOL’ shirt [New York Post]

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Assassin of Korean dictator’s brother wore LOL shirt

The story of Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan

In 1913, English mathematician G.H. Hardy received a package from an unknown accounting clerk in India, with nine pages of mathematical results that he found “scarcely possible to believe.” In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we’ll follow the unlikely friendship that sprang up between Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom Hardy called “the most romantic figure in the recent history of mathematics.” We’ll also probe Carson McCullers’ heart and puzzle over a well-proportioned amputee. Show notes Please support us on Patreon!

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The story of Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan

How "I’m not a Robot" checkboxes work

Zuck That says, “Have you ever been on the Internet when you came across a checkbox that says “I’m not a robot?” In this video, I explain how those checkboxes (No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHAs) work as well as why they exist in the first place.” I mention CAPTCHA farms briefly, but the idea behind them is pretty straightforward. If a company wants to create an automatic computer program to buy 1,000 tickets to an event or make 1,000 email accounts, they can make a script that fills out the form one at a time, and when the program gets to a CAPTCHA, it will send a picture of it to a CAPTCHA farm where a low-wage worker will solve it and send the answer back to the computer program so that it can be used to finish filling out the form.

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How "I’m not a Robot" checkboxes work

This maglev quadcopter hints at transportation’s future

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCON4zfMzjU Hyperloop One engineers demonstrate the power of maglev using spinning arrays atop a copper plate. Despite weighing over 100 pounds, the gadget floats and could hold considerably more weight. (more…)

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This maglev quadcopter hints at transportation’s future

Unprecedented: Japan’s population has declined by 1 million in 5 years

Rich countries have low birthrates (in part because they have more rights for women, and women who can control their bodies and fates choose to have fewer children on average than women who live in poor countries with fewer rights for women); Japan, one of the most xenophobic of all the rich countries, has the killer combination of a near-total ban on immigration from poor countries (where all the young people are) and a high standard of living. (more…)

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Unprecedented: Japan’s population has declined by 1 million in 5 years

10 hours of ambient noise from an icebreaker in the frozen arctic

Imagine the horror being trapped in a hostile landscape surrounded by snowflakes that were one objects of amusement but now form a blizzard of menacing proportions. Then smile because you’re not a fascist, and are merely stuck on a polar icebreaking vessel for 10 hours. 10 hours video of Arctic ambience with frozen ocean, ice craking, snow falling, icebreaker idling and distand howling wind sound. Natural white noise sounds generated by the wind and snow falling, combined with deep low frequencies with delta waves from the powerful icebreaker idling engines, recorded at 96 kHz – 24 bit and designed for relaxation, meditation, study and sleep.

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10 hours of ambient noise from an icebreaker in the frozen arctic

Autonomous bat bot weighs 93g, flies like a bat

A team of roboticists from Caltech and Urbana-Champaign have built a biomimetic “bat bot” that uses nine joints to deform a foot-wide wing membrane to achieve breathtaking aerial maneuvers. (more…)

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Autonomous bat bot weighs 93g, flies like a bat

Civilization ported to 8-bit Commodore 64

Civilization was one of the classic games of the 16-bit age, when computers with speedy processors and hundreds of kilobytes of RAM made it possible to model and memorize complex, culture-bound simulations of human history. Twenty years on, though, it’s been ported back to a humble 8-bit system that predated it by years. The genius behind the conversion is Fabian Hertel, and it’s not just a mockup: a fully playable demo is available to enjoy . 8-bit Civ runs on Commodore 64 and, while reduced in scope, features cities, units, AI opponents, scientific advances and wonders of the world. 8 Bit Civilizations (working title) has understandably been reduced in scope from the original PC and Amiga versions. For example you can play against a maximum of 3 AI opponents (or 2 if barbarians are enabled), and the world map is not as large. However even in its current state, the game is every bit as fun as the original, and even includes some innovative new features. Such as you may chose the gender of your nation’s leader, so if you choose to play the English nation, you be Henry VIII as well as Elizabeth I. The game board is played from an isometric perspective, a feature which wasn’t added in the original line of games until Civilization II (1996). It clearly doesn’t shy much from the game’s complexity. Check out the traditionally numbing endgame going on in the screenshot below!

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Civilization ported to 8-bit Commodore 64

Dial-a-Grue: play Zork with nothing but an old phone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=cJzgiDgBpcw The first iteration of Dial-a-Grue , in 2011, was to kit out an old rotary dial phone with an embedded computer and text-to-speech engine so that you could play Zork with nothing but the handset. The new, 2.0 version of the project, is “to port Zork I (via a z-code interpreter) to an embedded platform, and enclose that and an old modem inside a telephone, so that the game can be played from a teletype, TDD, or old computer with an acoustically coupled modem.” ( via JWZ )

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Dial-a-Grue: play Zork with nothing but an old phone