5 Intriguing Things
A short advisory: I am looking for a mobile developer to make an app for 5IT. It will be a very simple app. And I'd like to turn the collaboration on and creation of the app into a story.
1. Teju Cole's prose poem about the vuvuzela, symbol of World Cup 2010.
"The vuvuzela: a fever, impolitic, a site for mass hallucination, plastic in which time becomes deliriously plastic, a mask assumed for non-mortals, overtones roiling somewhere to the left of human hearing, black magic."
+ From his stunning WC2010 blog.
2. How this guy tried testing whether Vermeer used an optical machine to create his paintings.
"That's where things got a little out of control. The simple-sounding experiment took years to complete. I decided that to really test the theory, I would have to make a little time machine. I would build an exact full-scale model of the room Vermeer painted in The Music Lesson, and then sit in the room with my optical device and paint, using natural light and only materials available to Vermeer in the 17th century. I reasoned that if I, a non-painter, could paint something resembling a Vermeer, my theory might hold water. A few of the items that appear in the painting could be purchased, for example the viola lying on the floor and the Turkish carpet covering the table. Almost everything else I would have to build myself. Fortunately, I'm a DIY kind of guy."
"At the core of such tracking is the MAC address, a unique identification number tied to each device. Devices looking for a Wi-Fi network send out their MAC address to identify themselves. Wireless routers receive the signals—and addresses—even if a connection is never made... Even though stores may not mine this data to try to identify individuals, there are plenty of legitimate privacy concerns about the data collection, especially since people tend to be unaware that it is happening. Apple’s solution, as discovered by a programmer, is for iOS 8, the new operating system for iPhones which will be out later this year, to generate a random MAC addresses while scanning for networks. That means that companies and agencies that collect such information will not necessarily know when the same device (i.e., person) visits a store twice, or that the same device pops up in stores across the country or the world, suggesting a much-travelled owner."
4. Yeast 2.0: rebuilding the world's biotechnology workhorse with undergraduate labor.
"This is the site where you will learn about our ongoing project to synthesize a designer eukaryotic genome – our assembly strategy and the design features of the new version of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome, which we fondly refer to as Sc2.0. Also, these pages describe the Build-A-Genome course, an innovative educational program to engage undergraduate students and others directly in the Sc2.0 project by producing synthetic DNA that will be directly used in the project. These pages also serve as a forum for engaging the yeast and synthetic biology communities in our initiative to synthesize a modified version of the genome, chromosome by chromosome, from the 'bottom up.' We welcome input on the design features of Sc2.0 – or future versions."
"'I think that roaches certainly have the mental ability to learn all the component tasks that would make up this scenario,' said Cole Gilbert, an entomologist at Cornell University. 'It would just take a lot of training, and no one has demonstrated this yet. With the caveat that I have not seen what is actually being portrayed, I think that roaches could be trained to go from A to B and back to A if they were neighboring cells.'"
Today's 1957 American English Usage Tip
brace, n. (=two). Used esp. of dogs, game, and of things that are a pair, as a brace of pistols. When used after a numeral, usually in the singular form: We shot 20 brace. When used of people, usually facetious or contemptuous. See COLLECTIVES.
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