Linear Programming – Researchers Approach New Speed Limit for Seminal Problem
Introduction The traveling salesperson problem is one of the oldest known computational questions. It asks for the ideal route through a certain list of cities, minimizing mileage. Despite seeming simple, the problem is notoriously difficult. While you can use brute force to check all the possible routes until you find the shortest path, such a […]
How to do things if you’re not that smart and don’t have any talent
An Introduction to the WARC File
April 1st, 2021 by Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, Web Archivist for Archive-It Want to know more about a tool in our web archiving toolbox? Your suggestions or questions for future posts about Archive-It technology are very welcome here. It’s a digital preservation mantra: lots of copies keeps stuff safe (LOCKSS). And web archiving is a useful example […]
Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure
LONDON — There was something odd about these Alzheimer’s cases. Part of it was the patients’ presentations: Some didn’t have the classic symptoms of the condition. But it was also that the patients were in their 40s and 50s, even their 30s, far younger than people who normally develop the disease. They didn’t even have […]
A Tour of Lisps
2023 seems to have been the year where I “made the rounds” of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and “staying in your program”. Secondly must have been […]
Darknetlive Sold to Incognito Market
Incognito, a darknet drug marketplace, purchased the news site Darknetlive in November 2022. They have since used it to suppress criticism and steer public perception in their favor. This shift in ownership is chilling Tor journalism, ensuring that an invaluable publication will one day be seized and censored by government: DeepDotWeb’s history repeating. Darknetlive launched […]
The Big Little Guide to Message Queues
A guide to the fundamental concepts that underlie message queues, and how they apply to popular queueing systems available today. Message Queues are now fairly prevalent—there are so many of them showing up so fast you’d think they were rabbits with an unlimited supply of celery, resulting in an kafkaesque situation where making a decision […]
Lessons from history’s greatest R&D labs
Note from Jeremy: There are few things more important to our civilization than understanding how to better do R&D. Thankfully, Eric Gilliam has dedicated himself to studying this question. As a result, he’s become the foremost scholar and historian of 19th and 20th century R&D labs. I thought I was fairly well informed when it […]
Thaddeus Cahill’s Teleharmonium
by Jay Williston (illustrations from U.S. patents580,035 and 1,213,804courtesy of the U.S. Patent Office) The IdeaIn 1890’s, Thaddeus Cahill was a lawyer and an inventor living in Washington DC. Before inventing the Telharmonium, he mostly invented devices for Pianos and Typewriters. In 1893, after fooling around with his telephone, trying to broadcast music through the […]
An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart’s plane may have found it
Transportation A former US Air Force officer spent $11 million searching for Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane — and may have found it Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert and Rebecca Rommen 2024-01-28T04:58:18Z Share icon An curved arrow pointing right. Share Facebook Icon The letter F. Facebook Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to send an email. Email […]