Links

• A Roman ring with “Pilato” on it found in Israel?
• OS/2 Warp: A tribute
• Maine Governor Moving to Florida for Lower Taxes. Nice for him that he can afford to move to Florida. It seems like the people who make the rules can usually avoid their consequences.

Haven’t read these next two, just linking for convenience:

• On magnets or underground: how does the Russian anonymous marketplace work?
• The act of drawing something has a “massive” benefit for memory compared with writing it down

DIY air purifier

Fan based DIY air purifier

Academia and Big Tech

Two links:

Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole

My experience of real-time censorship on Twitter

Thinking Like An Algorithm

The Ghost of Cognition Past, or Thinking Like An Algorithm

Party planner

Instead of a bouncy castle, how about a Kubota U25 compact excavator?

Female programmers

Why aren’t there more female programmers? There are fewer now than there were thirty years ago, says a respondent.

UPDATE 21 May 2017: About the movie Hidden Figures: “NASA, like all federal agencies, was desegregated in the 1940s.”

PVC structures

Here are a couple of PVC furniture projects. The screen is particularly interesting, and probably adaptable for outdoor use.

The most important news story this week

And it’s not good news. Scientists created a part-human, part-pig embryo.

That’s evil,and insane. God did mankind a favor at Babel.

“The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built. Then the LORD said: If now, while they are one people and all have the same language, they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that no one will understand the speech of another. So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. — Genesis 11, New American Bible

UPDATE 30 January 2017: Summary of chimera research.

Car theft by hacking

How to stop car thieves? “If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.”

Weird science

More questions than answers in this:

“A person or persons at the same US Geological Survey Lab in Lakewood, Colorado have been discovered faking scientific results. According to a report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the US Department of Interior, the thimblerigging didn’t happen only once or twice, but in many multiple instances and over a long course of time.

“In what appears to be a monumental effort at deception or malfeasance or just plain laziness, between 1996-2008 and again between 2008-2014, somebody or some bodies at the Energy Geochemistry Laboratory purposely gave out wrong results from a mass spectrometer (used to identify the chemical constituents in a sample of material).” — Report: This Government Lab Has Been Faking Data for Years, by William M Briggs