Items of Interest

Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus

For fans of the great TV show Halt and Catch Fire, technologist Ashley Blewer created a great course syllabus for the show. The site is split into 15 classes that link to important RFCs, articles, books, and other resources in the history of computer science and the IT industry that inspire the events of the show.

History

Tech

Web Dev

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Big O Notation Explained

#254

That Computer Scientist published a post that does a great job at explaining Big O Notation as easily as possible - "Big O Notation is a mathematical notation used to classify algorithms according to how their run time or space requirements grow as the input size grows."

Tech

Web Dev

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Natrium Molten Salt HALEU Nuclear Reactor

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Nuclear reactor company Natrium, which is backed by Bill Gates' Terrapower, has received a US$80m Department of Energy grant to build a demonstration reactor by the mid 2020s. The 345MWe reactor can power 225,000 homes and uses molten salt as an energy storage and transfer system, which is safer than pressurised water and removes the need for a large amount of concrete shielding.

Environment

Innovation

Science

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Sound of Mars

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The NASA Sound of Mars website simulates how a range of sound clips sound on Mars versus on Earth. The differences in atmosphere and temperature mean sounds are attenuated, lower in volume, and slower.

Audio

Science

Space

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Top Gun: Maverick LEGO Trailer

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Onbeatman recreated the entire trailer of Top Gun:Maverick from scratch in LEGO!

Video

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17th Century Letter X-Ray

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Researchers from MIT, King’s College London, Queen Mary University London, Utrecht and Leiden used X-ray microtomography scans of a 17th century folder letter locked letter to unfold and read the letter virtually without ever opening it. As amazing as this is, it is even better that the letter contained a complaint! :-)

History

Innovation

Science

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Web Application Security Checklist

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Teo Selenius from appsecmonkey.com published a very extensive and useful list of web security issues to check and protect against, covering front-end, server-side, infrastructure, and monitoring.

Web Dev

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Operating Principles For Decision Making

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Luca Canducci on Compound Interests published a useful post on using operating principles, such as 2-way door decisions and asynchronous first communication, to help make decision making easier.

Business

Life

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Fastest Random Number Generator

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Researchers have built the fastest random number generator by firing a laser into a translucent semionductor shaped like a bowtie and measuring the fluctuations in the intensity of the resulting scattered beam, at a rate of 250 terahertz.

Innovation

Science

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Vaccine Efficacy Explained

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The New York Times published a vaccine efficacy explainer, using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as an example, that describes how the different percentage figures are calculated.

Data Vis

Life

Science

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