The (Holiday) Weekend Nerdiary

Episode 8

Welcome to a holiday weekend edition of the Weekend Nerdiary! (Good excuse for waiting until Monday to send this out!) This week we'll fight COVID with the Death Star, dig deep into Calvin & Hobbes, learn about Martin Scorsese's mom, and build ourselves a rail gun. Onward...

((( Bio beat )))

"On Wednesday, most of the nursing home residents were out of isolation, and Sister André was readying herself for her birthday...Then will come the fun part: port wine as a lunch starter, followed by foie gras with hot figs. Sister André will have roasted capon with mushrooms and sweet potatoes as a main course, followed by a two-cheese platter — Roquefort, and goat cheese — and maybe a few glasses of red wine. And finally, her favorite dessert: a raspberry and peach flavored Baked Alaska. That will come with a glass of Champagne."
 

XKCD does it again: Here's an amazing explanation of how mRNA vaccines work in terms of, of course, Star Wars. (Click for the full comic.)

=- Space invaders -=

Ready to have your mind blown? The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys has mapped the northern sky in seven colors, covering a third of the entire sky — 14,000 square degrees, or the equivalent area of 70,000 full Moons on the sky and released a 10 Terapixel image containing 1 billion galaxies. Check out that link to pan, zoom, and dream.

There's more details about this on Bad Astronomy if you're curious.

[[ Shiny new things ]]

The Aurora 7 is the 7-screen, 26-pound laptop you never knew you needed...UNTIL NOW:

More details on ExtremeTech.
 

Someone created a Calvin & Hobbes search engine! Try it! (Search for "boink" for one of my favorite quotables)
 

Radio Garden - an amazing exploration and visualization of radio stations around the world (and you can listen to them!)

** Play time **

Here's a jaw-dropping video of 3 y/o (!) Misha Osipov playing a chess match against Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov:
 

Yuzu is a work-in-progress emulator for the Nintendo Switch. But as you'll read, it's making an amazing amount of progress. Available for Windows & Linux.
 

Looking for a way to spend the next 6000 hours of your life? Check out the DCS: World series of "free to play" flight simulators ("free" as in money...not time.) Prepare to never leave your room. A taste:

{ Code code code code code }

Github1s is a simple, clever idea: Take any Github repo, and replace the "github.com" with "github1s.com" to automatically launch the full repository in Microsoft's in-browser code viewer (based on Visual Studio Code).

Try it here:
 

What's the oldest commit in any repository on Github? This one from 1972 is a contender (explanation in this Twitter thread)

!! Truth is stranger than truth !!

‘I’m Not a Cat,’ Says Lawyer Having Zoom Difficulties - Ahh yes - the 'ol "cat activated my Zoom filter" defense...

In case you're curious about the details here - turns out it's not actually a Zoom filter, but a decades-old piece of software pre-installed on some Dell laptops.
 

Here's a great clip of Martin Scorsese talking about his mom's cameo in Goodfellas:

And of course, here's the scene:

|| Long(ish)reads ||

The Strange Case of the Woman Who Can't Remember Her Past -- Or Imagine Her Future - Wired's great take on Susie McKinnon, who has a (unique) disorder called "severely deficient autobiographical memory" - which means she lacks the ability to mentally relive any part of her life.

:: Pretty pixels ::

Here's a great Google Arts & Culture experiment called Playing a Kandinskywhich is an artistic interpretation of what Kandinsky's synesthesia might have been like to experience.
 

Minjin Kang creates beautiful, 3D, "architectural rendered dreamlike spaces".

Super awesome bottle design project for Castle & Key Spirits.

Nina Geometrieva is a designer @ Google who's released a series of digital art she calls "fine glitch art".

.. /dev/urandom ..

Wanna build a Gauss Cannon aka mini railgun? Yes of course you do. Watch:
 

Here's a video of the largest glacier calving ever captured on film (Manhattan provided for scale at the end)
 

And last but not lease, here are some goats casually defying gravity:

That's it for this week! Thanks again for playing along. If you enjoyed this, feel free to forward to someone else who might as well. If you got this from a friend, subscribe here.

Until the next one,
--Noah

Copyright © 2021 NLH Heavy Industries, LLC. All rights reserved.

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