The Weekly Weird - 2016-03-11

Ok, this little missive has been depressingly un-weird lately, it's time to fix that:

• Microsoft releases SQL Server on Linux. How long before I can run Windows on GNU HURD? Also, ctrl-F 'source' ...
• Moot, of 4chan fame, now works for Google.
• What happens when Syrian refugees to Canada are booked at a hotel full of furries? There's no punchline, why did you assume there was going to be a punchline?
• I think the lede is wrong on this article, who cares about the typo when the real news is that one guy's credentials let you transfer an unbounded amount of money from the NY Fed?.
• Does personality cause politics?. I struggle mightily to reconcile the way my brain works with the way I see large chunks of the world behave, maybe there's more to it than my lack of imagination.
• It takes sophisticated computer-guided pigment deposition equipment to spoof modern biometrically-secured information terminals. Oh hang on, I left the obfuscator on. Fake Fingerprints From an Inkjet Printer Can Fool Your Smartphone. Much better.
• AlphaGo is pretty impressive but it turns out that there were predictions in 2007 of a computer beating the human champion at Go within 10 years so maybe not everyone is equally surprised.
• Financial Stuff:
  • A nice Bloomberg story on the origin of ETFs.
  • About half of you will find this super interesting: Rather than only providing pages of text describing their trading systems, dark-pool operators should give regulators mathematical models that show precisely how they work, Aesthetic Integration Ltd. told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a letter last week. The code could then be examined with formal verification..
• Building a Distributed Hypervisor on FreeBSD. It's hard for me to believe that SSI is anything but an old Slashdot punchline involving petrified grits.
• It goes without saying that I don't really know enough about any of the words in this title to properly evaluate it but this sounds pretty neat: The Bayesian Second Law of Thermodynamics.
• Snapchat. (Also, I love the phrase 'the olds')
• Remember when I said disk is dead? Surely it's not going anywhere for cold storage though! Don't call me Shirley.
• The most exciting words to hear in science are "huh, that's weird". Per a random comment, this is at 2σ which is not nothing but ~1/20 chance of being random noise. Also, apparently the LHC shuts down in the winter so as not to deprive Geneva of electricity.
• Rust stuff:
  • A lovely guide to compiling rust to asm.js.
  • And some more rust/emscripten stuff.
  • An excellent thread about designing an API for parsing urls. More complexity than you might think.
• Backpfeifengesicht is one of my favorite words, though Verschlimmbesserung is making a strong play.
• Today in games-that-I-can-never-play-without-becoming-a-cautionary-tale: MYMMO, A cat exploring Kowloon and Offworld Trading Company.
• Is productivity down or are we just measuring it wrong? WSJ (paywall) and NY Times. Actual NBER paper
• Finally, I'd like to call out this quote by Lily Wachowski:

  But these words, "transgender" and "transitioned" are hard for me because they both have lost their complexity in their assimilation into the mainstream. There is a lack of nuance of time and space. To be transgender is something largely understood as existing within the dogmatic terminus of male or female. And to "transition" imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another. But the reality, my reality is that I've been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life, through the infinite that exists between male and female as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary. Binary is a false idol.