Some Things I Read Last Week Jan 9 — Jan 15
Why poor neighborhoods make the best investments, using Grand Theft Auto to teach computers how to drive, miniature nuclear reactors, and more in this weeks edition of some things I read last week.
In case you missed last week:
Interesting
This is an extremely dangerous, and unfortunately unsurprising move, by the Obama administration just days before Trump takes office.
This isn’t a moral argument on why investing in poor neighborhoods is a good idea. This is a by the numbers demonstration of how far our money goes in poor vs rich neighborhoods.
I was unaware of mixed civil and criminal stance that cities take in order to get around legal land mine of using automated cameras as witnesses, but this article delves into one law professor’s battle against a traffic camera ticket. In the process, he shows how difficult it is to battle the existing system, even when you’re in the right.
Science
Jeanette Epps will be the first black ISS crew member.
Graphene does it’s magic again, creating one of the strongest and lightest materials ever. The interesting takeaway here though is that it has more to do with the structure of the materials than the materials themselves.
Centrifuges are used to separate out blood, helping doctors test for diseases. However, they are bulky, expensive, and difficult to access in developing areas. It turns out that the key to a cheap, 20 cents, centrifuge was in a 5,000 year old toy.
Miniature nuclear power plants could provide a safer alternative to existing nuclear power and a potential backup power source for existing forms on renewable energy.
Design
elementary OS is doing an incredible job of building a operating system with a focus on user experience. This Linux based OS has gotten a lot of additional press recently with many Mac users dissatisfied with the current direction of Apple. The article below is a good demonstration of the amount of thought they put into building each and every screen, so that it’s powerful and accessible.
Windows 10 may be the OS with the least consistent and modern design language, but it looks like Microsoft is working to fix that.
Non rectangular headers have started to crop up everywhere. Here’s some good inspiration if you’re thinking of incorporating this into any of your designs.
Nested symbols in Sketch can be extremely powerful. This article goes in depth on how you can use them to build a highly flexible mockup.
Technology
A great overview of what to expect over the coming years for self driving cars: the obstacles they’ll face and how they can be overcome.
Chris Lattner, the project lead for the Swift programming language and the creator of the LLVM, is leaving Apple after 11 years to become the President of Autopilot Software at Tesla.
We’ve been working with cameras and screens that can only capture a small portion of the actual colors in the world, but recently we’ve seen new screens and devices that are capable of producing many more. This is Instagram’s story for how they’re making the switch to handle these.
How Flickr managed to go a year without increasing their storage by even a single byte.
Virtual Reality
Once VR systems are able build a 3D model of our surroundings and have an understanding of the space, a whole new world of options for altered reality opens up.
The prestigious startup accelerator, Y Combinator, is showing interest in VR; hopefully leading to more investment in the field.
Interested in getting started in 3D modeling? This is an intro to the the open source 3D modeling program Blender for developers.
How can we use VR to attain a different perspective on the world and ourselves?
Cryptography & Security
Be careful when opening a Gmail attachment. It may be an extremely clever phishing attack. I highly recommend reading through the follow up discussion.
https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/812265182646927361
Security is hard. Even for companies worth billions of dollars.
This is an amazingly clear walkthrough of the Chacha20 encryption algorithm, which is starting to replace several older stream ciphers. If you have some basic crypto knowledge and you’ve wanted to know more about how a popular encryption algorithm works under the hood of , this is a great place to start.
Symmetric cryptography may be the oldest form of cryptography, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t face a lot of challenges and misunderstandings about it today. This article takes you step by step through Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD).
While reading the previous article, I couldn’t recall how to calculate the probability of accidentally creating a duplicate random number which lead me to the following article which explains very clearly how to calculate and estimate the probability of collision.
Artificial Intelligence
Using Grand Theft Auto to teach computers how to drive.
