Categories
Links

Friday link pack #4

Future Crunch seriously nailed it in this week’s edition. So much good stuff in there, but here are some of their quick links from near the end of the newsletter:

At the beginning of every disaster movie, there’s a scientist being ignored

“I never hear scientists, true scientists, good quality scientists, speak in terms of nationality.” Never before have so many of the world’s researchers focused so urgently on a single topic. Nearly all other research has ground to a halt. — NYT

An open dataset of 47,000 articles on coronavirus has been created by Google and made machine readable, meaning researchers can use AI to generate insights. — Kaggle

Researchers from around the world have set up an online platform for volunteers who want to help them fight the coronavirus. There already over 35,000 volunteers.

There are now 95 treatments and 52 vaccines in development for COVID19 in over 200 clinical trials in the US, China and EU. — Milken Institute

The largest of these is being run by Oxford University. Almost 1,000 patients from 132 different hospitals across the UK with thousands more expected to join. — Harrogate

The Gates Foundation is building seven factories for each of the top seven vaccine candidates. “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven, so we don’t waste time.” — BI

Over a million people have joined up to create the world’s largest networked supercomputer, and it’s just successfully simulated the opening motion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein. — Folding@Home

The Stockdale Paradox (H/T Daring Fireball)

Admiral Jim Stockdale was the highest-ranking military officer in the Hanoi Hilton. He was there for, I think, seven years, from 1968 to  1974. He was tortured over twenty times. And by his own account, Stockdale came out of the prison camp even stronger than he went in.

In preparation for a day I got to spend with Jim Stockdale, I read his book In Love and War. As I read this book, I found myself getting depressed because it seemed like his systemic constraints were so severe, and there was never going to be any end to it. His captors could come in any day and torture him. He had no sense of whether, or if, he would ever get out of the prison camp. Absolutely depressing situation. It’s like we can all survive anything as long as we know it will come to an end, we know when, and we have a sense of control. He had none of that.  

A deeper look at Apple’s latest changes and how the affect PWAs, via Ionic.

TL;DR: if it’s a home screen app the 7 day counter will never be hit, and if you’re using Capacitor/Cordova there is no counter as they use WKWebview.

Criterion announce “War Of The Worlds” Blu-ray

Really hoping this gets a UK release, that film is incredible.

The important thing is to not be afraid

Categories
Links

Friday link pack #3

Location data of phones on a Florida beach during Spring Break
via The Loop

Life size pizza table and meatball pizza
via Under Consideration

Quarantined photographer executes fantastic FaceTime fashion shoot
via Cult Of Mac

‘RoboCop 2’: The crazy story of how Cain got his CG puppeteered head
“What’s ironic about that is – the stop-motion that Tippett Studio did in RoboCop 2 is astounding. In my opinion, Cain is the pinnacle of stop motion as a realistic VFX technique. It had never been done better, and now probably never will be. Because built right into Cain, in its earliest, crudest form, was the technology that would effectively end stop-motion as a VFX tool just a couple of years later. Nobody knew it at the time, but RoboCop 2 was a turning point in VFX, with its past and its future combined into a single character.”

The Story of ‘Sandstorm’ by Darude

Categories
Links

Friday link pack #2

Nintendo Customer Support Goes Above And Beyond For 95-Year-Old Grandma’s Busted Game Boy

Nine Inch Nails make Ghosts V-VI available for free

Astronaut Chris Hadfield Reviews Space Movies, from ‘Gravity’ to ‘Interstellar’ | Vanity Fair

Flight 008 first podcast episodes are now online

“Eleven of the biggest writers in science fiction, through eleven unique stories, follow one single thread: a non-stop flight from Tokyo to San Francisco that passes through a wrinkle in spacetime and lands in the year 2040.”

I haven’t linked directly to Apple Podcasts etc because personally I use Overcast and I prefer to be easily offered the choice of player.

Categories
Apps Tools

Mockoon – run mock APIs locally

I’ve been working through “Building Forms with Vue.js” by Marina Mosti, and a tool she mentioned to use was an open source free API simulator called Mockoon:

“Mockoon is the easiest and quickest way to run mock APIs locally. No remote deployment, no account required, open source.”

Seriously, this app is brilliant. I think I’ll get a lot of use out of it 😄

H/T to Enjoy The Vue podcast, episode 6.

Categories
Links

Friday link pack #1

Flight 008, a multi-part science fiction story

Following on from the XPrize “Seat 14C” science fiction competition from 2017.

“Eleven of the biggest writers in science fiction, through eleven unique stories, follow one single thread: a non-stop flight from Tokyo
to San Francisco that passes through a wrinkle in spacetime and lands in the year 2040.

With performances by an all-star cast Dan Stevens, Calista Flockheart, Reid Scott, Keith David, Alfred Molina, and Danny Trejo Flight 008 is an audio experience unlike any other.”

https://www.watchdust.com/audio/

An opensource DIY self driving platform for small scale cars

As mentioned in the Talk Python To Me episode #255 “Talking to cars with Python” podcast, Donkey Car is “a high level self driving library written in Python. It was developed with a focus on enabling fast experimentation and easy contribution.”

Raspberry Pi computers in buggies, sounds good to me 😎.

Percussive Maintenance

It’s an old video, but it’s right up there with “have you tried turning it off and on again?”. Percussive Maintenance on Vimeo.

Elon Musk and a Starship a week

Great article from Art Technica, Inside Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week—and settle Mars

Categories
Science

We are waves of the same sea

I meant to post this a while back (pre-vaccine release), but it was left languishing in the drafts.

If you read one thing today, this newsletter from Future Crunch should be it. It’s not overly lengthy, and this section in particular struck a chord with me.

Don’t forget the scientists. There are more of them alive today than have ever existed, and right now as you’re reading this, they’re all pulling in the same direction. Medical research is faster and of higher quality than at any other time in history. It only took two weeks after Chinese health officials reported the virus to the WHO for geneticists to isolate it and figure out the full sequence. During the SARS outbreak in 2002 it was months before the viral genome was sequenced and longer still before it was remade in the lab. Back then, it cost $10 to create a synthetic copy of one single nucleotide, the building block of genetic material. Now, it’s under 10 cents.

Dozens of biotech companies and public labs around the world have created those synthetic copies, and are now working around the clock. In the last 72 hours, three companies that specialise in messenger RNA therapeutics, BioNTech, CureVac and Moderna, have announced they have candidates. Animal testing has shown promise, and human trials are now just weeks away, with a vaccine expected to be ready for public use within the next 12 to 18 months. That means that a vaccine could become available within two years of the virus’s emergence. By comparison, it took 48 years to create a successful vaccine for the polio virus, and decades for most other vaccines, including Ebola.

It was scientists who discovered the threat, sequenced the genome, gave us the graphs to flatten the curve and the internet protocols that allow information about the virus to travel faster than the virus itself.

Future Crunch is fantastic and well worth signing up to.

Categories
General

“One day I’ll create a proper blog for myself”

Yeah.

One day.

When I get a spare hour or two.

When I decide which static site generator I want to use.

After a long time reading other indie blogs I decided to just go for it. Basic WP theme, no bells and whistles, just content that I’ve found or written in an easy to administer format.

So here we go for 2020, and yes I’m even using Gutenberg 😎.