Kirr

Previously the smallest known Turing machine with number of steps before halting greater than Graham's number had 13 states. Now a 10-state such machine seems to have been found!

(Personally I hope the newly found mathematical prowess of AI's can be put to productive and peaceful use of finding Busy Beavers, and solving numerous Busy Beaver-adjacent questions, beginning with BB(6) and the Collatz conjecture.)

> a whopping 728 feet across, more than twice the length of an American football field

For the rest of the world, this is ~222 meters, more than twice the length of a 100 meter track.

EDIT: Ninja'd! :-)

The secret? "You're absolutely right!" Say this enough times and you can change anyone's mind, as Dale Carnegie noticed 90 years ago already.

Kin-dza-dza!

To address this question, apply a mathematical trick, and convert it to the equivalent "Why aren't happy people smarter?". This new question admits a range of straightforward solutions, depending on how kind you are to the handicapped.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" is getting realer with each passing day. As well as arguing with your front door from Ubik.

Aye-aye sir! Captain on the bridge!

Very cool, but may have some unexpected consequences. E.g., someone can probably use this to synthesize a bacterial genome containing every known drug resistance gene, and this is just the first thing that comes to mind. Possibilities for bioeconomy indeed.

"Never postpone until tomorrow what you can postpone until after tomorrow"

Philip K. Dick's "Small Town" is found!

Well there is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1YrANSmOGY - Not sure if it counts as large, but it's a start.

This may be as good time as any to plug my calculator for finite resistor networks (including grids) [1]. It works by eliminating non-terminal nodes one by one with the Star-Mesh transform, while keeping the exact rational resistances at each point.

[1] https://kirill-kryukov.com/electronics/resistor-network-solv...

MathJax [1] still recommends this way of using it:

  <script src="https://polyfill.io/v3/polyfill.min.js?features=es6"></script>
  <script id="MathJax-script" async src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mathjax@3/es5/tex-mml-chtml.js"></script>

Therefore, if you ever used MathJax, by possibly copying the above and forgetting, make sure to patch it out.

[1] https://www.mathjax.org/#gettingstarted

EDIT: To clarify, patch out just the polyfill (the first line in the snippet). You can of course keep using MathJax, and the second line alone should be enough. (Though still better host a copy by yourself, just in case).

The study is based on a web questionnaire, answered by 589 out of 2552 Ph.D. students. The mental health of the remaining 1963 students who did not take the survey is very likely to be in worse shape than of those who did.

In discussion the authors say "Moreover, we want to emphasize the likely sample bias in our data. We recruited participants mainly via mailing lists and our project therefore probably has especially appealed to people who are already interested in health or aware of mental health issues."

I guess this bias could be significant. I can't imagine that someone who is particularly stressed, depressed and sleep-deprived will pay attention to a mailing list message that has anything to do with mental health, or aks "How's your PhD going?". Personally, if I saw such email, I would close it and forget it as fast as I possibly could.

Another problem is that people tend to lie to themselves about their mental health issues, telling themselves that it's not too bad. They would answer the survey more optimistically, as if this makes the issues go away. It takes a good capacity of self reflection to see the problems clearly, and the loss of such capacity often accompanies other mental health problems.

Additionally, it takes a particularly trusing personality to discuss your health issues in a web survey. You never know how anonymous it all really is and where the collected data may end up eventually. I'm not sure how this correlates with mental health. The paranoid types will obviously be less trusting, but I guess a certain level of care when sharing your personal health data should be normal. In any case, this is another inevitable source of bias in survey-based data.

These points don't invalidate the study, just suggest that it probably underestimates the real prevalence of mental health issues.

There is a dark side to this advice. Try calling yourself a thinker, a visionary, an ideas guy, a philosopher. Soon you start believing it, then it gets to your head and inflates your ego (already gigantic to begin with). And now your peers (or god forbid subordinates) are on a whole new level of misery when they have to deal with you.

Someone should submit a series of "boring numbers" to the OEIS. It would include all numbers not listed in any other series. Although it would be hard keeping it up-to-date.

Johnny Cab gets closer to reality with every passing day. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY )

+1 to FILCO, just want to add: Pick one with the letters printed on the sides of keycaps, not on top. This way they last longer. (BTW, my favorite switches are black, then red, I hate browns).

It's also similar to forming words from multiple kanji. E.g. like Chinese "penguin" is combined from "business" and "goose" (not completely accurate translation).

Imagine poor kids 100 years from now having to memorize all those emojis and their combinations at school. Or having to know 3000 basic emojis in order to be able to read news.

They dig it up; they cart it back to their base. Somehow it gets thawed; it wakes up, probably not in the best of moods...

These tiny connectors absolutely must be used with a proper crimper.

http://www.mattmillman.com/info/crimpconnectors/dupont-and-d...

Berg Electronics was founded in 1950. It blows my mind that we still use this connector after 70 years.

https://www.connectortips.com/breakthrough-contact-design-sp...

The article presents a dichotomy between "web" and "app". This fails for users who consider a web browser itself to be an "app", which is indeed well suited for solving a problem of "browsing web". For as long as this problem remains well solved by a specialized app (browser), I don't need any redundant tools for e.g. reading news, interacting with communities, etc.

Reminds me Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Day Mr. Computer Fell out of Its Tree” (written in 1977).

"It had been a bad idea from the start, back in 1982, to operate every mechanism from a central source. Of course, the basic idea had sounded good: with the ozone layer burned off, too many people were behaving irrationally, and it had become necessary to solve the problem by some electronic means immune from the mind-slushing ultra violet radiation now flooding earth. Mr. Computer had, at the time, seemed to be the answer. But, sad to say, Mr. Computer had absorbed too much freaked-out input from its human builders and therefore, like them, Mr. Computer had its own psychotic episodes."