My first team at FB was SRO: Site Reliability Operations. This is different from SRE: Site Reliability Engineering. Think much less proactive/creative/forward-thinking/preventative coding and investigating, and much more OH GOD PUT THE FIRE OUT NOW. Our primary job responsibility was … Read more
March 14, 2010 The Mystery of 355/113 Today’s date is a good excuse to memorize a few more digits of 3.1415926535897932384626433832795…. And yet decimal approximations to pi are an artifact of our ten-fingered anatomy. Fractional approximations to pi are more … Read more
In 1998, outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, a hydraulic excavator at Buesching’s Peat Moss & Mulch stripped back a layer of peat and struck bone in the underlying marl. Bone is the right word: This bone belonged to a mastodon, … Read more
New study suggests mystery still surrounds what happened to the bodies of Waterloo militaries Were the bones of fallen Battle of Waterloo soldiers sold as fertiliser? Thousands of soldiers died on the Belgium battlefield yet very few human remains … Read more
Cell Cycle. 2019; 18(18): 2157–2163. PMCID: PMC6738531 This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. ABSTRACT Designed a century ago to treat epilepsy, the ketogenic diet (KD) is also effective against obesity and diabetes. Paradoxically, some studies in … Read more
Being able to accurately determine your location anywhere on the planet is a useful technological trick. But when tracking isn’t done by you, but to you—without your knowledge or consent—it’s a violation of your privacy. That’s why at EFF we’ve … Read more
The most commonly used material for producing solar panels is crystalline silicon, but achieving efficient energy conversion requires an energy-intensive and time-consuming production process to create a highly ordered wafer structure. In the last decade, perovskite materials have emerged as … Read more
In fact, Roman cuisine wasn’t at all like Italian food. It was all about contrasting sweet with salty and sour foods (they liked to eat fishgut sauce, garum, with melon). Instead Rowan compares it to modern Chinese food. “If it … Read more
I have always been fascinated by scientific discoveries that are hanging right in front of our noses. Cryptic species are one such surprise. Sometimes, researchers using genetic sequencing are surprised to discover that a group of animals that all look … Read more
A tweeted musing that merely mentioning a new AWS product would be enough to see it appear in job ads has come true — even though the product mentioned is made up. The story starts with the following tweet from … Read more