book review of The Escape Artist, a biography by Jonathan Freedland of Walter Rosenberg, aka Rudolf Vrba, one of the very few people who ever escaped from the #Holocaust in #Auschwitz. #history #genocide
The location of the Great Pyramid of Giza encodes the speed of light, in meters per second, to seven decimal places: 29.9792458° N. “The lesson of the Pyramid-lightspeed link is that sometimes it isn’t. It just looks like some sudden and shocking coincidence. The other lesson of the Pyramid is that I cannot consistently figure this kind of thing out. I threw everything I had against the correlation, and I still ended up with p = 0.003. I don’t think this is because the Pyramid really was designed by aliens with a suspicious link to 1600s France. I think it’s because I’m not creative enough to fully dissect coincidences even when I’m looking for them.” #pseudoscience #humor #epistemology
Metabunk is apparently a forums site devoted to debunking #pseudoscience? This one about the Great Pyramid of Giza and its amusingly-lightspeed-like latitude. #epistemology #humor
“The #egg-project uses #e-graphs to provide a new way to build program optimizers and synthesizers. An e-graph compactly represents many equivalent programs. These four e-graphs represent more and more (even infinite!) ways to write (a × 2) / 2. egg makes e-graphs fast and flexible enough for use in program optimization and synthesis.” #compilers
Neuroleptic #drugs can make your eyes roll uncontrollably in a scary way that isn’t dangerous. #medicine
"Divine hiddenness" in #Christianity and #Judaism
#Scott-Alexander explains his #atheism in terms of #Bayesian #epistemology
Says that type K #thermocouples (#sensors #hardware for use with #electronics), the common kind of thermocouples, work from a couple degrees above absolute zero up to 1260°C, with ±2.2°C or ±0.75% error, whichever is greater. Gives a data table for their output voltages, running from -6.458mV at -270° to 0 at 0° (by convention) to 29.129mV at 700° to 54.886mV at 1372°, which presumably is where they melt, which is about 40μV/°C, with predictable variations from linearity on the order of 3%. #metrology
“The 500-dalton rule for the skin penetration of chemical compounds” by Bos and Menardi in 02000, describing conditions when this does or doesn’t hold. #paper #PDF #medicine #toread
Tricaprylin is a medium-chain triglyceride with three caprylic acid (octanoin) residues, weighing 470 daltons. #materials
lrc.dartmouth.edu, low-resource computing conference. #small-is-beautiful
Kronar in Oglaf declares that aromatherapy is witchcraft and feelings are for women. #humor #NSFW
“The average rent in San Francisco, CA is [US]$3,597/month. Rent in San Francisco is 116% higher than the national average rent of $1,664/month, making this one of the more expensive cities statewide. Average Size: 573 Sq Ft” which works out to 53m² in modern units. “Studio apartments in San Francisco average $2,720 per month.”
The tax burden in #Germany. “The tax wedge is a measure of the tax on labour income, which includes the tax paid by both the employee and the employer.” and “for the average single worker” in Germany in 02024 the tax wedge was 47.9%, above the OECD average of 34.9%. “The employee net average tax rate is a measure of the net tax on labour income paid directly by the employee.” and, for the same worker, the employee net average tax rate was 37.4% (OECD average 25.0%). #CC BY 4.0. A #PDF extract of OECD (2025), Taxing Wages 2025: Decomposition of Personal Income #Taxes and the Role of Tax ReliefsTaxing [sic] Wages, OECD Publishing, Paris, <https://doi.org/10.1787/b3a95829-en>.
The GNU pinky command homepage has a #history of the #finger utility, originally by #Les-Earnest, then at #SAIL. “Finger was named for the act of pointing. I recall that sometime after it became popular I received a message from a system administrator who thought that it should be renamed so that users would not have to use a ‘dirty’ word. I gave his request all the consideration that it deserved.” The pinky difference is that it doesn’t support the finger protocol.
The "FastCDC" #paper explains the #content-defined-chunking #algorithms used by #Nix’s “attic” to deduplicate 64K chunks, published at #USENIX
USENIX (the organization) stopped sponsoring #USENIX (the conference), so “SIGOPS stepped in to continue the conference in response to a community petition.” #ACM
#Content-defined-chunking in #Nix: “Attic is a self-hostable Nix Binary Cache server backed by an S3-compatible storage provider. It has support for global deduplication and garbage collection.”
The #finger command considered as a social network
#humor about startups and the Epstein Files