Tokyo in 3D model | Tokyo Metropolitan Government Digital Twin Realization Project

Heel Tokyo in 3D, en helemaal gratis.

Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city | Hub

What appears to be evidence of some of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers.

The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations, according to the researchers.

Giant sloths and mastodons lived with humans for millennia in the Americas, new discoveries suggest

For a long time, scientists believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas soon killed off these giant ground sloths through hunting, along with many other massive animals like mastodons, saber-toothed cats and dire wolves that once roamed North and South America.

But new research from several sites is starting to suggest that people came to the Americas earlier—perhaps far earlier—than once thought. These findings hint at a remarkably different life for these early Americans, one in which they may have spent millennia sharing prehistoric savannas and wetlands with enormous beasts.

What happens when the internet disappears? – The Verge

(Ea-Nasir is onsterfelijk!)

The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia.

Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite – blag

Some of the interesting and insane facts I learned about SQLite

Jack Elam and the Fly

The extraordinary set-piece with the fly begins about six minutes into the opening credit sequence after the three gunmen, played by Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock, have taken over an isolated railroad station and are waiting for a train to arrive.

‘Obelisks’: Entirely New Class of Life Has Been Found in The Human Digestive System : ScienceAlert

Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects.

“It’s insane,” says University of North Carolina cell biologist Mark Peifer, who was not involved in the study, told Elizabeth Pennisi at Science Magazine. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”

These mysterious bits of genetic material have no detectable sequences or even structural similarities known to any other biological agents.

Laser mapping reveals oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago | Science | AAAS

Archaeologists once believed the ancient Amazon rainforest was an inhospitable place, sparsely populated by bands of hunter-gatherers. But the remains of enormous earthworks, pyramids, and roads from Bolivia to Brazil discovered over the past 2 decades have proved conclusively that the Amazon was home to large, complex societies long before European colonizers arrived. Now, there’s evidence that another human society—the oldest yet—left its mark on the region: A dense network of interconnected cities, now hidden beneath the forest in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, has been revealed by the laser mapping technology called lidar. The settlements, described today in Science, are at least 2500 years old, more than 1000 years older than any other known complex Amazonian society.

Rules for Writing Software Tutorials · Refactoring English

Most software tutorials are tragically flawed.

Tutorials often forget to mention some key detail, preventing readers from replicating the author’s process. Other times, the author brings in hidden assumptions that don’t match their readers’ expectations.

The good news is that it’s easier than you think to write an exceptional software tutorial. You can stand out in a sea of mediocre guides by following a few simple rules.

Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions

Over the holidays I decided it’s been too long since I did something with entirely no purpose. So without further ado, I present to you … Regex Chess: sequence of 84,688 regular expressions that, when executed in order, will play a (valid; not entirely terrible) move given a chess board as input. Here, I’ll show you.