Mahmoud

Fifty Years of Freshman Career Plans in Four Charts

TODAYS @DREWTOOTHPASTE: account muted 3 weeks

As ubiquitous as it is, GitHub is a little baffling for beginners because it’s not evident at the start how it actually works. So, GitHub made a video to help make sense of it all.

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World's largest and most authoritative structured repository of hate speech

Scientists find Alzheimer's drug makes teeth grow back

Researchers at King's College London found that the drug Tideglusib stimulates the stem cells contained in the pulp of teeth so that they generate new dentine -- the mineralised material under the enamel.

Tideglusib switches off an enzyme called GSK-3 which prevents dentine from carrying on forming. Scientists showed it is possible to soak a small biodegradable sponge with the drug and insert it into a cavity, where it triggers the growth of dentine and repairs the damage within six weeks.

Professor Paul Sharpe, lead author of the study, of the Dental Institute, from King's College London, said: "The simplicity of our approach makes it ideal as a clinical dental product for the natural treatment of large cavities, by providing both pulp protection and restoring dentine. "In addition, using a drug that has already been tested in clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease provides a real opportunity to get this dental treatment quickly into clinics."

Based on the "previouslies" in this post (ten years ago, seven years ago, three years ago), I'm starting to suspect the hand of the powerful Oral Decay Lobby in suppressing this technology.

Previously, previously, previously.

finally, get it all out of there. no one wants it. c’mon body, no half measures here, i wanna be hollowed out downtown

iliumtwins:

So, Neil Gaiman today.

Neil: “This was back in 1998, Terry [Pratchett] and I were sharing a hotel room to save money. I stayed out late, it was 3AM. So I did that thing that you do when you’re trying not to wake someone, tip-toeing to the bed. And from a dark corner of the room I hear a voice: “Have you any idea of the time? Your mother and I were worried sick.” Terry was still awake.“

Comments

mediamattersforamerica:

Perfect.

The previous entry got the attention it needed, and the maintainers of the VLC project connected with both Emularity developers and Emscripten developers and the process has begun.

The best example of where we are is this screenshot:

The upshot of this is that a javascript compiled version of the VLC player now runs, spits out a bunch of status and command line information, and then gets cranky it has no video/audio device to use.

With the Emularity project, this was something like 2-3 months into the project. In this case, it happened in 3 days.

The reasons it took such a short time were multi-fold. First, the VLC maintainers jumped right into it at full-bore. They’ve had to architect VLC for a variety of wide-ranging platforms including OSX, Windows, Android, and even weirdos like OS/2; to have something aimed at “web” is just another place to go. (They’d also made a few web plugins in the past.) Second, the developers of Emularity and Emscripten were right there to answer the tough questions, the weird little bumps and switchbacks.

Finally, everybody has been super-energetic about it – diving into the idea, without getting hung up on factors or features or what may emerge; the same flexibility that coding gives the world means that the final item will be something that can be refined and improved.

So that’s great news. But after the initial request went into a lot of screens, a wave of demands and questions came along, and I thought I’d answer some of them to the best of my abilities, and also make some observations as well.

When you suggest something somewhat crazy, especially in the programming or development world, there’s a variant amount of response. And if you end up on Hackernews, Reddit, or a number of other high-traffic locations, those reactions fall into some very predictable areas:

• This would be great if it happens
• This is fundamentally terrible, let me talk about why for 4 paragraphs
• You are talking about making a sword. I am a swordmaker. I have many opinions.
• My sister was attacked by a C library and I’m going to tell a very long story
• Oh man, Jason Scott, this guy

So, quickly on some of these:

• It’s understandable some people will want to throw the whole idea under the bus because the idea of the Web Browser playing a major part in transactions is a theoretical hellscape compared to an ideal infrastructure, but that’s what we have and here we go.
• I know that it sounds like porting things to Javascript is crazy. I find that people think we’re rewriting things from scratch, instead of using Emscripten, which compiles out to Javascript as a target (and later WebAssembly). We do not write from scratch.
• Browsers do some of this heavy lifting. It depends on the browser on the platform on the day and they do not talk. If there was a way to include a framework to tell a browser what to do with ‘stuff’ and then it brought both the stuff and the instructions in and did the work, great. Yes, there’s plenty of cases of stuff/instructions (Webpage/HTML, Audio/MP3) that browsers take in, but it’s different everywhere.

But let’s shift over to why I think this is important, and why I chose VLC to interact with.

First, VLC is one of those things that people love, or people wish there was something better than, but VLC is what we have. It’s flexible, it’s been well-maintained, and it has been singularly focused. For a very long time, the goal of the project has been aimed at turning both static files AND streams into something you can see on your machine. And the machine you can see it on is pretty much every machine capable of making audio and video work.

Fundamentally, VLC is a bucket that, when dropped into with a very large variance of sound-oriented or visual-oriented files and containers, will do something with them. DVD ISO files become playable DVDs, including all the features of said DVDs. VCDs become craptastic but playable DVDs. MP3, FLAC, MIDI, all of them fall into VLC and start becoming scrubbing-ready sound experiences. There are quibbles here and there about accuracy of reproduction (especially with older MOD-like formats like S3M or .XM) but these are code, and fixable in code. That VLC doesn’t immediately barf on the rug with the amount of crapola that can be thrown at it is enormous.

And completing this thought, by choosing something like VLC, with its top-down open source condition and universal approach, the “closing of the loop” from VLC being available in all browsers instantly will ideally cause people to find the time to improve and add formats that otherwise wouldn’t experience such advocacy. Images into Apple II floppy disk image? Oscilloscope captures? Morse code evaluation? Slow Scan Television? If those items have a future, it’s probably in VLC and it’s much more likely if the web uses a VLC that just appears in the browser, no fuss or muss.

Fundamentally, I think my personal motivations are pretty transparent and clear. I help oversee a petabytes-big pile of data at the Internet Archive. A lot of it is very accessible; even more of it is not, or has to have clever “derivations” pulled out of it for access. You can listen to .FLACs that have been uploaded, for example, because we derive (noted) mp3 versions that go through the web easier. Same for the MPG files that become .mp4s and so on, and so on. A VLC that (optionally) can play off the originals, or which can access formats that currently sit as huge lumps in our archives, will be a fundamental world changer.

Imagine playing DVDs right there, in the browser. Or really old computer formats. Or doing a bunch of simple operations to incoming video and audio to improve it without having to make a pile of slight variations of the originals to stream. VLC.js will do this and do it very well. The millions of files that are currently without any status in the archive will join the millions that do have easy playability. Old or obscure ideas will rejoin the conversation. Forgotten aspects will return. And VLC itself, faced with such a large test sample, will get better at replaying these items in the process.

This is why this is being done. This is why I believe in it so strongly.

I don’t know what roadblocks or technical decisions the team has ahead of it, but they’re working very hard at it, and some sort of prototype seems imminent. The world with this happening will change slightly when it starts working. But as it refines, and as these secondary aspects begin, it will change even more. VLC will change. Maybe even browsers will change.

Access drives preservation. And that’s what’s driving this.

See you on the noisy and image-filled other side.

Happy Upgrade To Love Day!

pervocracy:

argumate:

pervocracy:

Part of the New Internet Grammar: using question marks not to denote questions, but upturns in voice, so that a tentative statement gets a question mark but a flatly delivered question doesn’t.

why would you do this

It just seems right?

DNA Lounge update, wherein DNA Lounge will be closed soon, without your help.

Abstract

Part of Volkswagen’s $14.7 billion Dieselgate settlement requires the company to offer buybacks to nearly half a million owners whose cars cheated emissions tests. But that settlement does not stipulate that those bought-back cars have to be in good shape, so some owners are stripping their vehicles down.

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When I started this blog back in 2000, it wasn't necessarily my intention that mine would be the only voice here, though that's how it turned out. I had always thought that something that would be really cool would be for this blog to have an interview with every band who ever played here. After all, they're in the building: we've got access. But I'm not a music journalist or a reporter. It's not my strong suit. I had hoped that somehow, magically, I would run into the person who had a fire in their belly to do this: someone whose first two Dream Jeopardy Categories are "writing" and "musicians". Someone who would be excited by the proposal of: you want to write about music, and I can put you in a room with all the music. Done.

I've never met that person, so that never happened.

We've had over six thousand different bands and headliner-level DJs since then, so that would have been a hell of a thing.

This year, I decided to reexamine my potato-roasting method from the ground up with the idea of completely maximizing that crisp-to-creamy contrast in each chunk of potato, testing and retesting every variable, from cut size to potato type to boiling and roasting methods. The result is this recipe, which I firmly and un-humbly believe will deliver the greatest roast potatoes you've ever tasted: incredibly crisp and crunchy on the outside, with centers that are creamy and packed with potato flavor. I dare you to make them and not love them. I double-dare you. Read More

Aphex Twin headlines Day For Night Festival in Houston, Texas on 17 December. Tickets and info – http://www.dayfornight.io/

Film by Weirdcore

‘Cheetah EP’ out now:
Bleep –http://smarturl.it/cheetah-bleep
iTunes – http://smarturl.it/cheetah-apple
Stream –http://smarturl.it/cheetah-stream

Come on now! You were caught red-handed! And yes, that expression couldn't be more accurate given the lipstick in your hand!

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Filmed in Montreal, Quebec

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This man is in desperate need of love! So much that he kisses strangers until they run away...

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Filmed in Montreal, Quebec

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When everybody's smelling that weird odor except you, does it mean you're the source? That's what our Gags team is testing today with their persuasion power and expert noses.
Are you the one that stinks? We'll see about that!

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Image by Flickr, courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind

The inspirational blind and deaf activist and educator Helen Keller learned to speak aloud, but, to her great regret, never clearly.

Her careful penmanship, above, is another matter. Her impeccably rendered upright hand puts that of a great many sighted people—not all of them physicians—to shame.

Keller learned to write—and read—with the help of embossed books as a student at Perkins School for the Blind. The United States didn’t adopt Standard Braille as its official system for blind readers and writers until 1918, when Keller was in her late 30’s. Prior to that blind readers and writers were subjected to a number of competing systems, a situation she decried as “absurd.”

Some of these systems had their basis in the Roman alphabet, including Boston Line Type, the brainchild of Perkins’ Founding Director, Samuel Gridley Howe, an opponent of Braille. Students may have preferred dot-based systems for taking notes and writing letters, but Boston Line Type remained Perkins’ approved printing system until 1908.

There’s more than an echo of Boston Line Type in Keller’s blocky characters, as well as her spacing. Deviating from penmanship forms learned at school is a luxury exclusive to the sighted. Until formation became instinctual, Keller relied on a grooved board to help her size her characters correctly, an exhausting process. Small wonder that she ended many of her early letters with “I am too tired to write more.”

Perkins has published a Flickr album of letters Keller wrote between the ages of 8 and 11 to then-director Michael Anagnos, including 3 pages in French. Leafing through them, I marveled less at her ability and determination than my (sighted) 16-year-old son’s lack of interest in developing a respectable-looking hand.

Keller’s handwriting is so above reproach that it quickly fades to the background, upstaged by her charming manners and girlish preoccupations. A sample:

If you go to Roumania, please ask the good queen Elizabeth about her little invalid brother and tell her that I am very sorry that her darling little girl died. I should like to send a kiss to Vittorio, the little prince of Naples, but teacher says she is afraid you will not remember so many messages.

Browse Perkins’ collection of Keller’s handwritten letters to Michael Anagnos here.

Related Content:

Helen Keller Speaks About Her Greatest Regret — Never Mastering Speech

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

“A Glorious Hour”: Helen Keller Describes The Ecstasy of Feeling Beethoven’s Ninth Played on the Radio (1924)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and winemaker who played Annie Sullivan in her high school’s production of The Miracle Worker. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Helen Keller Had Impeccable Handwriting: See a Collection of Her Childhood Letters is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.