fun facts
Wonders of street view.
Make sure you press the random button plenty of times. ~ learn more
Category: fun facts
fun facts
Wheel running in the wild.
A lot of experiments with mice measure their running on wheels in their cages. Some had worried that the running was a symptom of captivity rather than a natural behavior, invalidating many experiments. So, between 2009 and 2013 researchers placed […]
fun facts
Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs.
The author compares the coming change to that of lawyers’ salaries in the 1990s due to the rise of the Internet. ~ learn more
fun facts
The industrial revolution’s many prerequisites.
“Consequently while we have many examples of the emergence of farming and from there the development of complex agrarian economies, we really only have one ‘pristine’ example of an industrial revolution.” ~ learn more
fun facts
Car tires produce vastly more particle pollution than exhausts.
Oh my! “Toxic particles from tyre wear almost 2,000 times worse than from exhausts as weight of cars increases” ~ learn more
fun facts
Amateur solves 20,000-year Ice Age drawings mystery.
“The team’s findings were published in the Cambridge Archeological Journal. Prof Paul Pettitt, of Durham University, said he was “glad he took it seriously” when Mr Bacon contacted him.” ~ learn more
fun facts
JPMorgan’s $175 million oops.
“That is, in some sense, JPMorgan paid Frank [the startup it acquired] $175 million for an email list. … It went poorly.” In their defense (hah, not really) there were 4.3 millions of those emails. Unfortunately they were emails bought […]
fun facts
Finally, an organism that eats viruses.
“For the first time, the team’s lab experiments have also shown that a virus-only diet, which the team calls “virovory,” is enough to fuel the physiological growth and even population growth of an organism.” ~ learn more
fun facts
The Overfitted Brain Hypothesis.
“The OBH posits that dreams are an evolved mechanism to avoid a phenomenon called overfitting. Overfitting, a statistical concept, is when a neural network learns overly specifically, and therefore stops being generalizable. It learns too well.” ~ learn more
fun facts
Breakout, a PDF experiment.
“Like many of you, I always thought of PDF as basically a benign format, where the author lays out some text and graphics, and then the PDF sits in front of the reader and doesn’t do anything.” That’s not the […]