Archive for the 'Off Topic' Category
“A 200,000-Light-Year-Long Chain of Young Blue Stars Located Over Halfway Across the Universe”
April 6th, 2023Via: Hubble Site: The universe is so capricious that even the slightest things that might go unnoticed could have profound implications. That’s what happened to Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum when he was looking through Hubble Space Telescope images and noticed a suspected blemish that looked like a scratch on photographic film. For Hubble’s electronic […]
DPReview.com Is Closing April 10th
March 22nd, 2023I became interested in 35mm photography back in the 1980s when I was in high school. After a brief stint in photography school in the early 1990s, I realized that the only way I was going to make consistent money with photography was with weddings. So, I moved on. But my love of photography remained, […]
Deluxe Home Vintage Computer Den
March 12th, 2023Via: Ars Technica: In a world where millions of people carry a 1990s-grade supercomputer in their pockets, it’s fun to revisit tech from a time when a 1 megahertz machine on a desktop represented a significant leap forward. Recently, a collector named Brian Green showed off his vintage computer collection on Twitter, and we thought […]
Nokia Launches a Low Cost, Easily Repairable Smartphone
February 27th, 20233.5mm headphone jack: Yes. Via: PC Magazine: The Nokia G22, a low-cost Android phone headed for Europe, features a QuickFix design that allows owners to perform several repairs themselves.
Encryption Lava Lamps
February 25th, 2023Via: Atlas Obscura: Cloudflare covers about 10 percent of international web traffic, including the websites for Uber, OKCupid, or FitBit, for instance. And the colorful wall of lava lamps in the company’s San Francisco headquarters might be what’s generating the random code. The wall features over 100 lava lamps, spanning a variety of colors, and […]
Hupfeld Phonoliszt-Violina
February 18th, 2023Via: WelteMax:
Clockwork-Like ‘Computer’ Discovered Inside Brainless Microscopic Organism
October 14th, 2022Via: ScienceAlert: Tiny single-celled critters obviously don’t have room for a brain to tell them how to move in complex ways, so to get about, they usually roll, slither or swim. But microscopic pond dwellers called Euplotes eurystomus have mastered a way to walk brainlessly – scurrying about like insects, with their 14 little appendages. […]
Scientists Uncover the “Chemistry Behind the Origin of Life”
October 7th, 2022Via: SciTechDaily: Purdue University chemists have discovered a mechanism for peptide-forming reactions to occur in water — something that has baffled scientists for decades. “This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” said Graham Cooks. He is the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue’s College of Science. “This is […]
Off Topic: Inside the 40 Year-Long Dungeons & Dragons Game
August 8th, 2022The video below reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to ask… I never DMed, ever, and I don’t want to start now. I’ve looked for tabletop RPG systems for my own children to use DMless and came across Four Against Darkness, which they played until the books fell apart. I bought the Legend of […]
Postmortem Sperm Retrieval Is Turning Dead Men Into Fathers
July 20th, 2022Via: Bloomberg: After a man dies, his sperm cells live up to 72 hours and can be retrieved with an incision to the testicle, then frozen.
