InforMattics

ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider In a paper published in Physical Review C, the ALICE collaboration reports measurements that quantify the transmutation of lead into gold in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

CERN's ALICE experiment used gold ions to recreate conditions similar to the early universe, observing how light converts into matter. By colliding ultra-relativistic gold nuclei, they captured rare photon-photon interactions that generated electron-positron pairs
#CERN
#LHC
#quantum
#physics
🧪

I filled in this form just now and was emailed an API key a few seconds later, strongly recommend doing the same

For ~40 yrs my mom taught students with multiple disabilities — ✨ kids who used wheelchairs + communication boards and would never live independently. They and she were vital parts of their primary school communities. It’s 💔 to think of the immediate + societal repercussions of their neglect.

<i>Dinobdella ferox</i> When it comes to parasitology, sometimes you have to get really up close with your study organism, as one researcher in Taiwan did in trying...

Sometimes, scientists put their own body on the line in the name of science - in this case a parasitologist decided to become a temporary host in order to investigate the life history of an enigmatic nose leech
#Invertebrate 🧪
dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2019/10/dino...

OK, so I'm watching the NORAD Santa Tracker. I just saw him go from Indiana to Illinois to Iowa to Indiana, and now he's heading back to Iowa again. Does Santa not know anyone in operations research?

all of unix is a lesson in the importance of defaults. clobber as default, append as an additional keystroke is one of the most bizarre ones.

[bet there's an abe simpson story like "oh back in the 70s you needed to club a baby seal to death to write a new line, so we chose to minimise seal death"]

After working on this paper for three years, delighted to see it out - we propose a way to defuse the tension between data openness and responsible dat management, by pushing the FINDABILITY of data and the opportunities for connections among data users #philsci #openscience

Supply-chain attack analysis: Ultralytics - The Python Package Index Blog Analysis of a package targeted by a supply-chain attack to the build and release process

Last week the Python package "Ultralytics" suffered a supply-chain attack on its build and release process. This is a review of the attack from @pypi.org's perspective.

There's plenty of advice for how Python projects can increase their #security posture:

blog.pypi.org/posts/2024-1...

Teacher: Now let's learn regular expressions. Regular expressions are a limited form of computation that can match many kinds of strings, but not parse recursively or execute arbitrary programs.

Student: And ^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$ determines if a number is prime.

Teacher: wtf

A organizational chart with two circles at the bottom and multiple branches extending from them at the top

New York and Erie Railroad, "Diagram Representing a Plan of Organization, exhibiting the division of academic duties and showing the number and class of employees engaged in each department," by D.C. McCallum + G.H. Henshaw, 1855, via Library of Congress

blogs.loc.gov/maps/2024/11...

Pop-Up Voting Centers Bring the Polls Directly to Unhoused Angelenos Nationwide, unhoused people have some of the lowest turnout among all voters. Los Angeles County is trying to change this with flexible polling centers that meet people where they are.

Very cool initiative in Los Angeles has provided new opportunities for homeless people to vote by bringing polling centers directly to shelters & service centers, and reminding people that they can legally vote without having to demonstrate a fixed physical home address:

1st post on bsky - about bsky! I was fascinated with academic starter packs and made an interactive network to see academic communities and how they connect - a map of knowledge! link to an interactive & searchable network: ketikagarg.github.io/blueSkyAcade...

(0/13)
A 🧵 about helping children you care about to learn maths. And you don't even have to be a mathematician, or even "good" at #maths, to do it. You just have to model resilience and positivity towards what they're doing, and to avoid reinforcing negative tropes.

Here's how:

Fleet in being - Wikipedia

"a database in being" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_i...

lol yeah. But no one liked my "LLM that searches your company's Github repos for plaintext credentials" startup 😭

Would insurance companies know, I wonder?

I liked www.manning.com/books/rust-i... a lot!

Umberto Eco describing LLMs in 1976

A tan grasshopper with dark brown spots and pinkish coloring mostly on top.

Rolling golden hills sprinkled with oak trees on a clear day.

Came across this "pink" grasshopper while hiking! It's the result of a rare genetic mutation -- supposedly there's a 1% chance of seeing them in a lifetime. There were thousands of (normal) grasshoppers hopping around, so I guess that helped our chances.
🧪

government agences 'treat Musk like some kind of unelected official'. Just call him Octavian. How long before we start to call him adulescens carnifex?

Bear in a swimming pool

Bear still swimming

Is everyone still happy to see pictures of the bear currently in my pool or are you monsters?

It's basically always that! The way I usually explain it is "it's the guy from Catch Me If You Can".

a progression of Godzilla models evolving to be larger and larger, but the first one is a gray cat

I prefer the original Godzilla design

Every day I try to be a real amiable sort of freak, just keeping pace

Oh yeah, this week on Counting Stuff, I started wondering what the heck SPF really means and learned.... it's not all that useful. Also fell down a rabbit hole involving solar radiation and UV spectra... because of course.
https://counting.substack.com/p/spf-is-a-pretty-unhelpful-unit