Tech

Polish Water Clams

The city water supply of Warsaw in Poland uses a rotating team of 8 clams to test the water quality of the supply. If the clams close after detecting toxins in the water supply, they complete a circuit which trips and alarm and shuts off the water supply of the city. (H/T to Mikael for sharing this)

Environment

Innovation

Tech

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Information Theory Introduction

#212

Information theory and entropy are theory topics that can quickly become very abstrast and difficult to get a handle on. Federico Carrone does a great job in this medium post at delivering an introduction to Information Theory that is based around real world scenarios to provide grounding context.

History

Innovation

Tech

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Manager's Playbook

#211

Kamil Sindi put together a great list of principles into a playbook for managers, which covers caoching, hiring, onboarding and announcing change, among other things.

Business

Tech

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Building Secure & Reliable Systems

#210

Google have partnered with O'Reilly to publish the Building Secure & Reliable Systems book, which looks to security best practices from Google SRE teams. The book is available to download for free.

Business

Tech

Web Dev

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Tech Spec Writing

#210

The Stack Overflow blog The Overflow has a very useful post by Zara cooper on how to write effective technical specifications, including a structure breakdown with a summatry of each section.

Tech

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Sofware Folklore

#210

Andreas Zwinkau has a great list of Software Folklore tales on his website, like figuring out why a car is allergic to vanilla ice-cream, and how moving the controller during a save crashed a Crash Bandicoot save on the Playstation.

Tech

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Custom ML Bird Identifier

#209

Hackster.io has a useful how to guide by Jen Looper describing the steps involved in building a bird identifier using a custom machine learning model running on a Google Coral Dev board with a Raspberry Pi Camera module.

AI & ML

Tech

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Infinite Monkey Piano

#209

The Pudding are running a live experiment to generate the opening bars of songs by brute force on piano, in an exploration of the infinite monkey theorem. The experiment has been running for 17 days and has currently cracked 18 songs including Still Dre and Für Elise. It is currently trying to crack Fast Car by Tracy Chapman.

Innovation

Music

Tech

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EUVsVirus Hackathon

#207

The European Commission are hosting a hackathon on April 24 to 26 to develop solutions to 37 COVID-19 challenges across Health & Life, Business Continuity, Social & Political Cohesion, Remote Working & Education, Digital Finance and other categories. Individuals, teams, mentors and organisations can participate to offer development, design & management skills to name but a few. (H/T to Mikael Fernström for sharing).

Innovation

Life

Tech

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Folding@Home Supercomputer

#207

Folding@Home is a distributed community computing platform that allows everyone to donate any spare computer processing power to protein folding simulation experiments. Folding@Home are now performing protein folding experiments on COVID-19 and in recent weeks, the number of users has jumped from 30,000 to 700,000.

Innovation

Science

Tech

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