Image: Golden, this photo is available to licence on EyeEm.
The NPR Short Wave podcast did a great explainer on why natural herd immunity to COVID-19 is not possible (13 minutes).
Image: The Verge
The Human Genome Nomenclature Committee has changed the names of humane genes and proteins because the symbols were being automatically converted to dates in Microsoft Excel. Symbols such as SEPT1 and MARCH1 have been changed to SEPTIN1 and MARCHF1. The tyranny of Excel's rule continues unabated :-p
Image: Hackaday, Aerospace Village
Floppy disks are still used to update the navigational databases on Boeing 747 aircraft every 28 days!
Image: Washington University in St. Louis
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a method to turn mason bricks into batteries. By soaking the bricks in a PEDOT conductive polymer, the bricks become capable of storing and conducting energy. One brick can be charged to 3 Volts in 10 seconds and then power a LED light for 10 minutes!
Image: 1secondpainting.com
1secondpainting.com demonstrates how a neural network trained on thousands of abstract paintings can generate new abstract paintings in under one second.
Image: nerf-w.github.io
Neural Radiance Fields For Unconstrained Photo Collections (NeRF) is a neural network project from researchers at Google that can take in a set of pictures of a place from the internet and automatically generate a representation of the scene that can be explored in 3D. The lighting and environmental effects of the scene can also be manipulated at a realistic level.
Image: Excel
Paul Graham published an excellent essay, as usual, on the four quadrants of conformism. The classification system provides an intruiging framework for putting current events and behaviours, such as mask wearing and police brutality to name but two, into context.
Image: Treksit.com
Treksit.com is an extrememly addictive game based on graph theory. Given a set of increasingly complex graphs, the aim is to reposition the nodes so that no edges are overlapping. Happy Friday!
Found This Week is a curated blog of interesting posts, articles, links and stories in the world of technology, science and life in general.
Each edition is curated by Daryl Feehely every Friday and highlights cool stuff found each week.
The first 104 editions were published on Medium before this site was created, check out the archive here.
I’m a web consultant, contract web developer, technical project manager & photographer originally from Cork, now based in London. I offer my clients strategy, planning & technical delivery services, remotely & in person. I also offer freelance CTO services to companies in need of technical bootstrapping or reinvention. If you think I can help you in your business, check out my details on http://darylfeehely.com
