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The Wild Storm: Warren Ellis reboots DC’s Wildstorm
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The Wild Storm: Warren Ellis reboots DC’s Wildstorm
YouTuber Brainiac75 got a lot of questions about the possible dangers of a supermagnet affecting the iron in his blood, so he did an experiment with real blood. (more…)
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Can a supermagnet dangerously affect the iron in blood?
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
Stilgar: Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen. Paul: Streuth! Say hi to Digaster longmani , an enormous earthworm reported on by 7 News Queensland in Australia . Adds Fox News : Robert Raven, Head of Terrestrial Biodiversity at the Queensland Museum, told the news site the earthworm in Mace’s photo could measure up to three feet long once it relaxes and stretches out. “In the 1970s, I was walking through Lamington National Park and could hear them beneath me as they gurgled through some water,” Raven recalled. “Seeing them is a sign we are getting good rain.”
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Giant worms roam Australia
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
This 1992 behind-the-scenes footage of a Scorpion motion capture session from the making of Mortal Kombat could easily be a piece of absurdist Dada performance art. (via Uncrate )
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Vintage motion capture session from the making of Mortal Kombat (1992)
Master luthier John Monteleone created a series of four archtop guitars , one for each season. Anthony Wilson of The Met shows how and why each sounds different than the others. (more…)
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Guitarist demonstrates beautiful tonal differences in "The Four Seasons" Guitars
Webflow’s history of the web is a Bayeaux Tapestry of obsolete virtues and current vices, a superimposition of new and old bad things. It’s a clever and very 2017 way to market a web design app that lets normal people keep making worthwhile mistakes on the web — a gateway to free expression — as it becomes increasingly technical and forbidding. I’m startled by how comfortingly, reliably minimal the very early stuff was. Even the lurid GIF explosion in late 1990s! Simple technology made even a terrible mess accessible.
If you’re craving some light reading, might I suggest Stephen Hawking’s 1965 doctoral thesis ” Properties of Expanding Universes .” In celebration of “Open Access Week 2017,” Cambridge University Library has made Hawking’s 117-page thesis freely available online. “By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet; to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos,” Hawking says . “Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding. “Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. It’s wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis – hopefully they won’t be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!” From the thesis abstract: Some implications and consequences of the expansion of the universe are examined. In Chapter 1 it is shown that this expansion creates grave difficulties for the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravitation. Chapter 2 deals with perturbations of an expanding homogeneous and isotropic universe. The conclusion is reached that galaxies cannot be formed as a result of the growth of perturbations that were initially small. The propogation and absorption of gravitational radiation is also investigated in this approximation. In Chapter 3 gravitational radiation in an expanding universe is examined by a method of asymptotic expansions. The ‘peeling off’ behaviour and the asymptotic group are derived. Chapter 4 deals with the occurrence of singularities in cosmological models. It is shown that a singularity is inevitable provided that certain very general conditions are satisfied.
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Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis now online
Martin Kirkholt Melhus’s workplace bans connecting his development computer to the internet, so he hacked together a modem using HTML5: by plugging over-the-ear headphones into his laptop’s 3.5mm audio jack and then placing the headphones over a network-connected built-in mic, he is able to tunnel a network connection outside the firewall (or that’s the theory; as he notes, “This was only ever intended as a gimmick and a proof of concept – not something that I would actually use at work.”) (more…)
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A working modem using HTML5 sound