Are we sick of of year rollover bugs yet? Well, let’s just agree that people aren’t sick of making these kinds of bugs.
A long time ago, someone at Oleksandr’s company needed to write a Python script that shipped a 4-digit year to a system that only accepted 2-digit years. So 2010 needed to turn into 10.
They could have used date formatting to format the date into a two digit year, but that involves understanding how to format dates. That just seems like too much overhead, when there’s already a perfectly good way to mangle a string.
year = str(timezone.now().year)
year = year.replace('20', '')
This particular method worked just fine for the vast majority of the 21st century, to date, but mysteriously stopped working on January 1st, 2020. Or, as this script might write the date, “January 1st, .”
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Diets in lower income countries can lack choice. A single staple crop might give people enough energy. But enough nutrients?
Children and pregnant women need zinc and iron to avoid diarrhoea and anaemia. Cassava doesn’t have much of either. But US biologists have found a way of genetically modifying it to boost its nutritional value. Science magic!
Ebola is no longer an incurable horror disease. Thanks to Canadian scientists.
The new vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV, was used in the last outbreak in the Republic of Congo. It protected over 90,000. Health responders deployed it in social rings: firstly those in contact with known cases, then their contacts. It’s the same strategy used against smallpox 40 years ago. And that was wiped out.
These are the Ctrl-Alt-Delete rings made and sold by Etsy shop JoyComplex. Available in vintage steel ($80), bronze steel ($80), and gold steel ($90), they make the perfect accessory for the IT professional who feels like people don't take them seriously when they ask if they've tried turning their computer off and back on again. "Of course I tried that, you think I'd call you over here if I hadn't, ding-a-ling?" Well what do you say *casually flashes jaw resetter* I watch you do it again, for my own sake? "But I'm your uncle!" PUSH THE BUTTONS.
Keep going for a few more shots.
Planetary scientist James O’Donoghue made this cool little visualization of the rotation speeds of the planets of the solar system. You can see Jupiter making one full rotation every ~10 hours, Earth & Mars about every 24 hours, and Venus rotating once every 243 days. He also did a version where all the planets rotate the same way (Venus & Uranus actually rotate the other way).
If you’ve ever looked at the replies on any newsworthy amateur video posted to Twitter, you’ll see an inevitable chorus of news organizations and broadcast journalists in the replies, usually asking two questions:
Did you shoot this video?
Can we use it on all our platforms, affiliates, etc with credit?
That gave me an idea, which I posted to Twitter.
I bet you could make a great breaking news site that just monitors this Twitter search of media properties asking for permission to broadcast user videos, and scoops them by automatically posting the most active videos. https://t.co/xP3160ezHQ
I’ve returned regularly since Corey launched it and, as expected, it’s a powerful way of tracking a particular type of breaking news: visual stories with footage captured by normal people at the right place and right time.
Much of it is of interest only to local news channels: traffic accidents, subway mishaps, a wild animal on the loose, the occasional building fire.
But frequently, Bbbreaking News shows the impact of gun violence and climate change: a near-constant stream of active shooter scenarios, interspersed with massive brush fires, catastrophic flooding, and extreme weather events.
It’s a fascinating way to see the stories that broadcast media is currently tracking and viewing their sources before they can even report on it, captured by the people stuck in the middle.
I recommend checking it out. Thanks to Corey for running with the idea and saving me the effort of building it myself!
This, my friends, is the trailer for Wonder Woman 1984. Ok, let’s see what we have here. Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, the only DC Comics movie superhero worth a damn since Nolan’s Batmans. 1984, one of the best years ever for movies and pop culture. A remix of Blue Monday by New Order, still the best-selling 12” single of all time. Patty Jenkins is directing and came up with the story this time (instead of having to deal with Zack Snyder’s nonsense). YES PLEASE.
This is The Deep Sea, a website 'made with ♥ by Neal Agarwal.' What is that, a cheap diamond? "It's a heart, GW -- like love." Now don't you get all mushy on me. I know how this goes: one minute you're getting all mushy on me and the next we're raising three kids in my parents' basement. "Say what now?" This is Deep Sea, a website made with cubic zirconiums by Neal Agrwal that allows a visitor to scroll to the bottom of the ocean learning facts and figures about various depths and the animals that live there along the way. "What did you learn, GW?" I learned I saw a f***ing polar bear at 24 meters and decided to not risk scrolling any further. "Why am I not surprised?" Tell me if you spot Atlantis.
Thanks to Jessica C, who agrees there's no way there isn't already a plastic CVS bag at the very bottom of the ocean.
Yesterday, an artist on Twitter named Nana ran an experiment to test a theory.
hey can y'all do me a favor and quote tweet/reply to this with something along the lines of 'I want this on a shirt', thank you pic.twitter.com/UhuGRQgU6b
Their suspicion was that bots were actively looking on Twitter for phrases like “I want this on a shirt” or “This needs to be a t-shirt,” automatically scraping the quoted images, and instantly selling them without permission as print-on-demand t-shirts.
Dozens of Nana’s followers replied, and a few hours later, a Twitter bot replied with a link to the newly-created t-shirt listing on Moteefe, a print-on-demand t-shirt service.
Several other t-shirt listings followed shortly after, with listings on questionable sites like Toucan Style, CopThis, and many more.
Spinning up a print-on-demand stores is dead simple with platforms like GearBubble, Printly, Printful, GearLaunch (who power Toucan Style), and many more — creating a storefront with thousands of theoretical product listings, but with merchandise only manufactured on demand through third-party printers who handles shipping and fulfillment with no inventory.
Many of them integrate with other providers, allowing these non-existent products to immediately appear on eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and other stores, but only manufactured when someone actually buys them.
The ease of listing products without manufacturing them is how we end up with bizarre algorithmic t-shirts and entire stock photo libraries on phone cases. Even if they only generate one sale daily per 1,000 listings, that can still be a profitable business if you’re listing hundreds of thousands of items.
But whoever’s running these art theft bots found a much more profitable way of generating leads: by scanning Twitter for people specifically telling artists they’d buy a shirt with an illustration on it. The t-shirt scammers don’t have the rights to sell other people’s artwork, but they clearly don’t care.
PLEASE RT: Never, ever, EVER respond to someone’s art on Twitter saying you want a shirt with that art. Bot accounts will cue into that and then pirate the artwork. This then becomes a nightmare for the artist to get the bootleg merchandise taken down. PLEASE SHARE.
What responsibility do print-on-demand providers have to prevent infringement on their platforms?
The first question is the hardest: we don’t know. These scammers are happy to continue printing shirts because their identities are well-protected, shielded by the platforms they’re working with.
I reached out to Moteefe, who seems to be the worst offender for this particular strain of art theft. Countless Twitter bots are continually spamming users with newly-created Moteefe listings, as you can see in this search.
Unlike most print-on-demand platforms like RedBubble, Moteefe doesn’t reveal any information about the user who created the shirt listings. They’re a well-funded startup in London, and have an obligation not to allow their platform to be exploited in this way. I’ll update if I hear back from them.
Until then, be careful telling artists that you want to see their work on a shirt, unless you want dozens of scammers to use it without permission.
Or feel free to use this image, courtesy of Nakanoart.
So since these art-stealing bots are tracking your text and not reply images, I made this for you guys!
If you want something from ANY creative made into a shirt, you can use this image to tell the artist you want to buy it. So you don’t need to type it out pic.twitter.com/E9Mn2GILcb
Nearly every reply to the official @Disney account on Twitter right now is someone asking for a shirt. I wonder if their social media team has figured out what’s going on yet.
I know I shouldn’t buy them, but some of these copyright troll bait shirts are just amazing.
This is a photo of several ice crystal halos around the Sun taken by Michael Schneider in the Swiss Alps with an iPhone 11 Pro. It. Is. Absolutely. Stunning. I can barely write more than a few words here without stealing another peek at it. According to Schneider’s post (translated from German by Google), this display developed gradually as he waited for a friend as some icy fog and/or clouds were dissipating at the top of a Swiss ski resort and he was happy to capture it on his new phone.
Displays like this are pretty rare, but Joshua Thomas captured a similar scene in New Mexico a few years ago and Gizmodo’s Mika McKinnon explained what was going on.
Ice halos happen when tiny crystals of ice are suspended in the sky. The crystals can be high up in cirrus clouds, or closer to the ground as diamond dust or ice fog. Like raindrops scatter light into rainbows, the crystals of ice can reflect and refract light, acting as mirrors or prisms depending on the shape of the crystal and the incident angle of the light. While the lower down ice only happens in cold climates, circus clouds are so high they’re freezing cold any time, anywhere in the world, so even people in the tropics mid-summer have a chance of seeing some of these phenomena.
Explaining the optics of these phenomena involves a lot of discussing angular distances.
As detailed in this Scientific American article by Erik Olsen, engineer and oceanographer Derya Akkaynak has devised an algorithm that “removes the water from underwater images” so that photos taken underwater have the color and clarity of photos taken in air. She calls the algorithm “Sea-thru”.
Sea-thru’s image analysis factors in the physics of light absorption and scattering in the atmosphere, compared with that in the ocean, where the particles that light interacts with are much larger. Then the program effectively reverses image distortion from water pixel by pixel, restoring lost colors.
One caveat is that the process requires distance information to work. Akkaynak takes numerous photographs of the same scene from various angles, which Sea-thru uses to estimate the distance between the camera and objects in the scene — and, in turn, the water’s light-attenuating impact. Luckily, many scientists already capture distance information in image data sets by using a process called photogrammetry, and Akkaynak says the program will readily work on those photographs.
The paper says the process “recovers color” and in the video above, Akkaynak notes that “it’s a physically accurate correction rather that a visually pleasing modification” that would be done manually in a program like Photoshop.
Almost two hundred years since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, this is the announcement trailer for the March 2020 debut of Half-Life: Alyx, an around 20-hour virtual reality-only gaming experience that's sure to piss gamers off when there isn't a follow up released for another millennia.
Set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, Alyx Vance and her father Eli mount an early resistance to the Combine's brutal occupation of Earth.
The loss of the Seven-Hour War is still fresh. In the shadow of a rising Combine fortress known as the Citadel, residents of City 17 learn to live under the rule of their invaders. But among this scattered population are two of Earth's most resourceful scientists: Dr. Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx, the founders of a fledgling resistance.
Based on the trailer, it looks promising. Of course based on my dating profile I also look promising until we finally meet in real life and you mistake literally every other person walking into the cafe for me because I'm actually a chair and you're sitting on me ouch please I think my rear legs are gonna break.
Keep going for the trailer.
The latest video from Kurzgesagt is a short primer on neutron stars, the densest large objects in the universe.
The mind-boggling density of neutron stars is their most well-known attribute: the mass of all living humans would fit into a volume the size of a sugar cube at the same density. But I learned about a couple of new things that I’d like to highlight. The first is nuclear pasta, which might be the strongest material in the universe.
Astrophysicists have theorized that as a neutron star settles into its new configuration, densely packed neutrons are pushed and pulled in different ways, resulting in formation of various shapes below the surface. Many of the theorized shapes take on the names of pasta, because of the similarities. Some have been named gnocchi, for example, others spaghetti or lasagna.
Simulations have demonstrated that nuclear pasta might be some 10 billion times stronger than steel.
The second thing deals with neutron star mergers. When two neutron stars merge, they explode in a shower of matter that’s flung across space. Recent research suggests that many of the heavy elements present in the universe could be formed in these mergers.
But how elements heavier than iron, such as gold and uranium, were created has long been uncertain. Previous research suggested a key clue: For atoms to grow to massive sizes, they needed to quickly absorb neutrons. Such rapid neutron capture, known as the “r-process” for short, only happens in nature in extreme environments where atoms are bombarded by large numbers of neutrons.
If this pans out, it means that the Earth’s platinum, uranium, lead, and tin may have originated in exploding neutron stars. Neat!
The other day I posted the news that the low railroad bridge that’s famous for ripping off the tops of trucks is finally going to be raised by eight inches, bringing an end to the internet’s viral fun. A reader alerted me to this interesting short documentary about the bridge:
The film features interviews with the man who has been recording all the bridge collisions since 2008, a state engineer who worked on a solution to the problem (a sensor to detect tall vehicles and trigger a stoplight and an “OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN” LED sign), and researchers at a behavioral research lab about how drivers plow into the bridge despite several layers of warning signs and (presumably) the knowledge of the height of their vehicle. (via @ShawnWildermuth)
Sleep is one of those things we still don’t completely understand and new discoveries are still being made. This research is quite interesting, as it brings some insights into how sleep cleans toxins from the brain.
“First you would see this electrical wave where all the neurons would go quiet,” says Lewis. Because the neurons had all momentarily stopped firing, they didn’t need as much oxygen. That meant less blood would flow to the brain. But Lewis’s team also observed that cerebrospinal fluid would then rush in, filling in the space left behind.
The brain’s electrical activity is moving fluid in the brain, clearing out byproducts like beta amyloid, which can contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.
So brain blood levels don’t drop enough to allow substantial waves of cerebrospinal fluid to circulate around the brain and clear out all the metabolic byproducts that accumulate, like beta amyloid.
Independent of the science, you have to wonder how people manage to sleep in an MRI machine!
Yet another potential use for CRISPR, although the gene editing technology is usually considered for macroscopic tasks, like editing mosquitoes, tomatoes, CO2-eating “ideal plants”, or even human babies, new research aims to deploy it against bacteria and viruses. An alarming number of bacteria are now resistant to one or more antibiotics, so this new line of inquiry would certainly be welcomed if it proves effective.
In their recent study, Dr. Edgell and his colleagues successfully used a Crispr-associated enzyme called Cas9 to eliminate a species of Salmonella. By programming the Cas9 to view the bacterium itself as the enemy, Dr. Edgell and his colleagues were able to force Salmonella to make lethal cuts to its own genome.
As we discover more of the benefits of our microbiota, it would also be interesting to have a solution to bacterial infections which doesn’t create problems for our “good bacteria.”
Conventional antibiotics do not distinguish between good and bad bacteria, eradicating everything indiscriminately and occasionally creating problems for people with weakened immune systems.
There’s still a long way to go though.
Now researchers face the challenge of demonstrating that Crispr antibacterial and antiviral drugs are effective in living animals and in humans, not just in the lab, and that they will be cheaper than conventional therapies, Dr. Barrangou said.
This is a worthwhile video of impressionist Jim Meskimen reading 'Pity The Poor Impressionist' (a poem he wrote about what it's like being an impressionist) in twenty different celebrity voices as his face transform from one celebrity's to the next thanks to the terrifying power of deepfake technology. If I didn't know any better I'd swear he really did transform into all those people. "Do you know better, GW?" THIS MAN IS A CHAMELEON.
Keep going for the video.
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