• The Z3 SMT solver is now open source: https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3

  • (HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9272275 )

• This is a good article on Intel, Micron and 3D flash with the nice pull quote of a 10TB 2.5" SSD being possible with the new 3d process: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-micron-3d-nand-ssd,28839.html

• God I want to get a bucket of these and just start chowing down in front of tourists: http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/03/this-futuristic-water-bottle-is-an-edible-gelatinous-blob/388087/
• Live migrating a server to another datacenter. Boring you say, vms have been doing that for years? Who said it was a vm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5MA685ApE
• Note that this has also been productized to let the fuzz seize computers without having to power them off and lose encryption keys in ram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G8sEYCOv-o
• Continuing my "WW2 is far too weird to have actually happened" conspiracy theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Castle_Itter
• Google's distributed cron: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2745840
• Uber has a pretty neat platform of their own: http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/03/uber-realtime-market-platform
• "Tachyon is a memory-centric, fault-tolerant, distributed storage system, which enables reliable data sharing at memory-speed across a datacenter": http://a16z.com/2015/03/17/tachyon/
• “Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?”: http://mononcqc.tumblr.com/post/35165909365/why-do-computers-stop
• Incuriosity Will Kill Your Infrastructure: http://yellerapp.com/posts/2015-03-16-incuriosity-killed-the-infrastructure.html
• News that will surprise exactly no-one: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/mris-show-our-brains-shutting-down-when-we-see-security-prompts/
• I don't really know what to make of this but: https://lwn.net/Articles/637658/
• I guess I never realized the triboro was part drawbridge: http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/03/26/an_illicit_look_inside_the_guts_of_the_triboroughs_drawbridge.php

A special, truncated edition, brought to you by the Vault 2015 conference.

• Hans Rosling being awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh7nfnUIAvAi
• Personally I think OpenSSL should win this every year by default but: https://underhandedcrypto.com/2015/03/07/announcing-the-underhanded-champs/
• Beer googles work in reverse: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25716115?dopt=Abstract
• Launching a new service during an Apple event is the wrong time to figure out that your DNSSEC configuration is bad: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/03/hbo-now-dnssec-misconfiguration-makes-site-unavailable-from-comcast-networks-fixed-now/
• Of specific interest to anyone who likes working in a non-flooded office: http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/03/10/see_the_10mile_dryline_that_could_protect_nycs_waterfront.php
• Older than the hills but: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Goodbye February, you delightfully symmetrical month.

• Google released a new rpc system over HTTP/2 and a new version of protcol buffers:

  • http://www.grpc.io/
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9114748
  • http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/introducing-grpc-new-open-source-http2.html
  • Somehow there's no ocaml implementation yet.

• This is how you get to Brakebills isn't it: http://gothamist.com/2015/02/25/secret_g_train_portal_whoa.php

• "When he was seven years old, Max-Hervé George was given a magic ticket by his father. It lets him turn back the clock, to invest with perfect hindsight week after week, steadily accumulating a fortune." http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/27/2120422/meet-the-man-who-could-own-aviva-france/
• http://glench.com/hash/
• You've probably seen this headline already but Google has some neat research on a self-learning game AI: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/02/from-pixels-to-actions-human-level.html
• You know the phrase "calling the shots"? Here's what that actually means: http://youtu.be/0vLVbhuzWOk?t=1m53s
• And since it led me into a youtube wormhole now you're going to have to watch the Tony awards intro from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=danBaPWT09A
• New Yorkers: more dangerous than sharks: http://science.time.com/2013/12/03/in-the-war-between-sharks-and-people-humans-are-killing-it/
• https://medium.com/message/just-checking-in-d2b5540f0064
• Uh, thanks fedora: https://i.imgur.com/9RymGA7h.jpg
• that sound effect http://www.breaknenter.org/projects/inception/
• Reminder that monsters are real: http://gawker.com/why-worry-about-land-sharks-when-now-there-are-land-oct-1687359330

Kind of lame this week, sorry.

• Fiberless fiberoptics at eleventy billion terabits per femtosecond: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/optoelectronics/fiber-to-the-living-room
• But that's not awesome enough for the datacenter where clearly we need 60ghz wifi: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall12/cos561/papers/wirelessDC-ancs12.pdf
• I think nobody expected the robot apocalypse to start with smoke detectors: http://bgr.com/2015/02/18/google-nest-smoke-alarm-video/
• I can't even crack a joke about this Lenovo nonsense: https://infected.io/120/lenovos-superfish-security-nightmare
• Limpet is just a fun word: http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-animals/2015/02/spider-silk-dethroned-nature-s-toughest-fiber

Plenty of stuff for you this week.

• I assume we're all reading Marginal Revolution anyway but: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/02/are-desserts-in-decline.html
• I'm not sure if I mentioned it in one of these emails but there was a weird one-bit-flip corruption that someone blogged about a while back: http://mina.naguib.ca/blog/2012/10/22/the-little-ssh-that-sometimes-couldnt.html
• Well it only took 2 years but someone with enough pull finally noticed it (or a nearly identical but unrelated bug) and got it fixed: http://blog.edgecast.com/post/110230974176/being-good-stewards-of-the-internet
• An interesting article about automation outliving the automator: https://medium.com/message/deathhacks-b767903b7c15
• It makes me just so inordinately happy that googling for "singlehandedly avoided starting a nuclear war" requires further disambiguation: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/27/vasili-arkhipov-stopped-nuclear-war (viz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov )
• More "brains are weird": https://hbr.org/2015/02/pronouns-matter-when-psyching-yourself-up (full study:http://cpl.psy.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Kross-et-al-.pdf )
• TRESSELATOR: http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/nasa-niac-spiderfab-status-update-on.html (see also http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/nasa-niac-tethers-unlimited-asteroid.html )
• Not super surprising but air gaps are less 'gappy' than you think they are: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/11/air_gap_feature/
• A great example of the tail wagging the dog: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4364
• Ocaml. TLS. Bitcoin. http://amirchaudhry.com/bitcoin-pinata/

I'm a slacker this week with a late, short and not terribly weird list.

• I hope Grace Hopper isn't an unknown to anyone reading this but just in case: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-queen-of-code/
• Pretty pictures on your console: https://sysdigcloud.com/aws-storage-latency-sysdig-spectrogram/
• Adblock, you were the chosen one! http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/over-300-businesses-now-whitelisted-on-adblock-plus-10-pay-to-play/
• Want some sci-fi to read? http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2015/02/2014-locus-recommended-reading-list/
• There are several things to recommend this article about attacks on ATMs but my favorite is "In 2004 [Liverpool] city officials hailed the first population gain since 1937—182 people" http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-atm-bombers/
• The videos from the Shmoocon security conference are up. I haven't watched any yet. https://archive.org/details/shmoocon-2015-videos-playlist#

Augh, I'm late this week! That'll teach me to do actual work.

"Digital computers translate between these two forms of information—structure and sequence—according to definite rules. Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) we perceive as memory, and bits that are embodied as sequence (varying in time, invariant across space) we perceive as code. Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition" --George Dyson

• A good set of readings about CRDTs which are a totally clever end-run around the CAP theorum: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/crdt/2014/07/22/readings-in-crdts.html
• Metastable Failures or: how programmers invent new curse words: http://thenewstack.io/the-strange-behaviors-of-facebooks-metastable-failures/
• Robotentacles: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/today-in-robotentacle-news-4/
• Yep, you're going to have to stop making fun of TV shows saying "enhance": http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0083325&
• I've been dutifully reciting the words fed to me by an alien race via a neural input for years. http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cyranoid-experiment/
• Being cursed with deep knowledge of something you enjoy is a curse not even the greek gods would think of on a bad day: http://www.jasonporath.com/2014/12/the-rise-of-the-hashgag/
• Which web framework does /your/ favorite boy band use?: http://2015.djangocon.eu/news/boy-band-disrupts-djangocon-europe/