Measuring the Speed of Light
Ro.bert
Hey there,
Robert here.Here’s your weekly dose of treats 💌Some things I thought were worth sharing this week!
Follow the white rabbit 🐇....🎶 Something to listen while reading
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Rapid-fire stuff I’ve been reading, skimming & enjoying
We write code, not documents; Without being critical of academia, this seemed like a good opportunity to try to shatter by-the-book software development ideas for some future engineers by sharing a different way — our way.
Most anguish isn’t an illness but an evolved response to adversity; All disorders, including mental disorders in psychiatry, are caused either by genetic mutations, failures of physiological functions due to ageing, and/or environmental factors – the relative risk of each causal factor varies across the different life phases.
The history books will need to be updated. Vikings may not be who we thought they were.
How big money is powering a massive hunt for alien intelligence; It would survey 1 million of the closest stars to Earth and 100 nearby galaxies using two of the world’s most sensitive steerable telescopes, the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia. Buying up about 20% and 25% of the time on those telescopes, Breakthrough Listen promised to cover 10 times more sky than previous surveys and five times more of the radio spectrum, and gather data 100 times faster.
Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun; Here’s a fun rabbit hole to go down if you have some free time to spend.
After a fellow named Zikubi beat the speedrun record for Super Mario Bros 3 by about 8 minutes with a time of just over three minutes, speedrun analyst Bismuth made the video above to explain how he did it…by changing the game with the gameplay itself.
The first couple minutes go exactly as you’d expect, but the speedrun takes a weird turn when, instead of using the second warp whistle to go to level 8, he uses it to go to level 7. And once in level 7, Mario races around randomly, letting opportunity slip away like a blindfolded birthday boy unwittingly steering himself away from the piñata. It’s only later, during the explanation of how he got from level 7 to the final screen so quickly, that you realize Mario’s panicky idiot behavior is actually the player actively reprogramming the game to open up a wormhole to the ending.
Techy tech tech // ⚗️ Tools & Resources
🧱 Wrrooom!Illustration Constructor; generate illustrations in Sketch and Figma. Wrroom lets you build illustrations with hundreds of drag and drop elements. As well as an illustration builder, it comes with an avatar creator to create faces with different expressions.
🧿 AHA Music - Song Finder for BrowserRecognize songs like Shazam.Click the button to identify songs playing near you.
📅 I started experimenting with a new Calendar app.
Test your reaction time. While an average human reaction time may fall between 200-250ms, your computer could be adding 10-50ms on top. Some modern TVs add as much as 150ms! This is real Mental Chronometry, the study of reaction time (RT; also referred to as “response time”) in perceptual-motor tasks to infer the content, duration, and temporal sequencing of mental operations.⚡Remember: Speed Matters
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👽 In case you missed my Latest YouTube Video
I have revived this old initiative I had on the channel, in which I provide a quick review of the books I enjoyed and would recommend.Book: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel Levitin
suby sub sub here <3 ...keep going 🐇...
Tweets for thought
So why am I not an academic? There are many factors, and starting Tarsnap is certainly one; but most of them can be summarized as “academia is a lousy place to do novel research”. In 2005, I made the first publication of the use of shared caches in multi-threaded CPUs as a cryptographic side channel, and in 2006 I hoped to continue that work. Having recently received my doctorate from Oxford University and returned home to Canada, I was eligible for a post-doctoral fellowship from Canada’s National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, so I applied, and… I didn’t get it. My supervisor cautioned me of the risks of doing work which was overly novel as a young academic: Committees don’t know what to make of you, and they don’t have any reputational prior to fall back upon. Indeed, I ran into this issue with my side channel attack: Reviewers at the Journal of Cryptology didn’t understand why they were being asked to read a paper about CPU design, while reviewers at a computer hardware journal didn’t understand why they were being asked to read about cryptography. It became clear, both from my own experiences and from advice I received, that if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure.
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That’s it! 👋
Thanks for reading!If you enjoyed this, maybe I can tempt you with my YouTube channel.
My website is here.💌 My Favorite Links: articles I’ve enjoyed, podcasts, tech, software, ideas, and personal philosophies.
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Again, you can also reach out via Instagram, Twitter, or using gravitational waves.That said, how’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment?
I respond to every email I get—consider sending me a message and telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been up in your world.
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Have a great day ahead!
Robert