The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”

The strange transformation of a criticality accident into dark Internet humor

How animals learned to hibernate and why we can’t do it (yet) | Aeon Essays

The conventional view is that humans and other creatures around us live between periods of waking and sleeping. But it is not true. Many have mastered the art of hibernating, which allows them to spend quite a lot of their life in a mysterious state of suspended animation – sometimes more than half of it. What is hibernation, and is it something that humans might be capable of?

Meet the ‘giant’ river crabs that live beneath Rome’s ancient ruins

Not much remains from the time Rome was only a marshy valley—except the crabs that have taken over ancient canals.

Urbanization cut the crabs off from the Tiber, isolating them from other members of their species and trapping them in the middle of the developing city. “They have been stuck in the center of Rome since antiquity. What we see today is a relic of an ancient population that once lived there,” explains Damiani.

A solution to the Onion Problem of J. Kenji López-Alt | by Dylan Poulsen | Medium

Kenji López-Alt posed a mathematical problem on his YouTube channel about how to best cut an onion. I present a detailed solution.

Bigfoot – Recreating Bluff Creek – YouTube

Heerlijk, als een (uitstekende) 3D-modellering iets helemaal ontkracht. Geen onnatuurlijk groot iemand met onnatuurlijk lange armen whatsoever. 🙂

Hacker in Snowflake Extortions May Be a U.S. Soldier – Krebs on Security

Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake, but a third suspect — a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m — remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person’s identity may not remain a secret for long: A careful review of Kiberphant0m’s daily chats across multiple cybercrime personas suggests they are a U.S. Army soldier who is or was recently stationed in South Korea.

How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System ‹ Literary Hub

The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. They gave the West its founding stories: the opposition of darkness and light at the Beginning; the Flood, with its ark and dove and surviving patriarch; the tower of Babel; the distant ancestors of Odysseus and Hercules. The Sumerians established the outlines of our political, legal, and temporal structures too, with the first kings and assemblies, the first written laws, the first legal contracts, and the sexagesimal system of counting that regulates the hours and seconds of our days.

The Sumerians wrote the first epics and constructed the first monumental buildings. They invented the wheel, the sailing boat, the dome, and the arch. They were the first people to cast, rivet, and solder metals. They were the first to develop mathematics, calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle two thousand years before Pythagoras and enabling extraordinary achievements in civil engineering. Compiling methodical lists of plants and animals, the Sumerians were the first people to apply rational order to our knowledge of the natural world.

Features – The Many Faces of the Kingdom of Shu – Archaeology Magazine – November/December 2024

Thousands of fantastical bronzes are beginning to reveal the secrets of a legendary Chinese dynasty

Old Testament Interpretation Part 1 – Lecture 1

An introduction to the contents of the Old Testament (Pentateuch and Historical Books) and to the methods of its interpretation.

Copper Sushi 🍣

This is a map of the European electrical transmission network. Each dot is a connection point where all the consumption from nearby settlements connects to the network, as well as all electricity generation from nearby power plants.

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels – Interaction Magic

Piloting an ocean exploration ship or Martian research shuttle is serious business. Let’s hope the control panel is up to scratch. Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2×2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world.

These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.

Welcome to the world of LEGO UX design.

Petty squabbles and bloody battles – the life of an ancient Roman soldier | Aeon Videos

When one imagines life in the ancient Roman army, it’s easy to conjure images of historic, bloody battles fought at close range. But, as this video from the British Museum details, life in the Roman army was, at its core, a job, with its own distinct barriers to entry, bureaucracies, benefits, hierarchies and interpersonal conflicts. Providing a tour of the exhibition ‘Legion: Life in the Roman Army’, which was on display at the museum earlier this year, the curators Richard Abdy and Carolina Rangel de Lima explore the intricacies of Roman army life through the experiences of a foreign soldier named Claudius Terentianus, who left behind many letters detailing his rise through the ranks and ultimate retirement – complete with a pension and full Roman citizenship.