#introduction to amateur #astronomy with optical #telescopes
The Olivetti Programma 101 was a 1964 desktop computer with printing numeric output, 240 bytes of memory, and four program-start keys labeled V, W, X, and Z, which jumped to four customizable labels. It had 10 22-digit registers, which could hold 24 instructions each (so, I suppose, zero-operand), all in magnetostrictive delay lines with a 2.2 ms cycle time. It could load 120-instruction programs from magnetic cards. FORTY THOUSAND WERE SOLD. #hardware #history
The Olivetti Programma 101 desktop computer from 1964, including #emulation and a documentary, “Quando Olivetti inventò il PC”. #history
“(to good approximation) elastic polymers do not store any potential energy in stretched chemical bonds or elastic work done in stretching molecules, ... Instead, the energy to do work comes entirely from thermal energy, and (as in the case of an expanding ideal gas) only the positive entropy change of the polymer allows its internal thermal energy to be converted efficiently (100% in theory) into work.” #elasticity #springs
“#Springs are characterized by relatively low energy density (about 0.1 Wh/kg for steel) ...[but] high power density (around 10 kW/kg for steel)”. I guess that would be 360 J/kg.
sped-up #video of injecting (331 bytes of) code into a Super Mario Brothers game on the SNES to morph it into a Flappy Bird game.
“Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks”, by Alec Radford, Luke Metz, and Soumith Chintala, generated realistic images of bedrooms with convolutional #deep-learning #neural-networks by simultaneously training two networks in a sort of Turing test: one that tried to generate realistic images of bedrooms and one that tried to distinguish between the real images and fake ones. They call this technique "DCGANs". #GANs #machine-learning
Terry Broad (“Artist and research student in the Computing Department”) uses #DCGANs in #TensorFlow to generate simplified representations of Blade Runner frames and see what they look like. #GANs #art
#pdf #paper describing the Reyes #graphics #rendering architecture, from 1987, by Cook, Carpenter, and Catmull.
#PDF about the #GreenArrays F18A #hardware used in the GA144, documenting its instruction set. #stack #ISA #Forth
The sensational case where a bank robber had a steel collar locked around his neck with a bomb on it, which killed him when its timer ran out.
Review of historical programming or digital logic games including Rocky’s Boots, Robot Odyssey, DroidQuest, and MindRover; Robot Rally, The Incredible Machine, and Scratch show up in the comments.
Why Redis is designed the way it is: because programmers deserve simple UIs too. “Learning to configure Sendmail via M4 #macros, or struggling with an Apache virtual host setup is not real knowledge. If such a system one day is no longer in use, what remains in your hands, or better, in your neurons? Nothing. This is ad-hoc knowledge. It is like junk food: empty calories without micronutrients.”
#Dyneema “Bully Braid” braided fishing line for AR$305 for 100 meters in either 0.14 mm or 0.18 mm diameter, advertised at 10.2 kg or 12.2 kg respectively. That would be about 6–6.5 GPa, which is over twice the yield strength Wikipedia and Polyco claim that #UHMWPE has.