Misc for now
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Apples are one of the most delicious and easy-to-carve materials readily available, along with other fruits, and conveniently come in spheroids that are perfect for slicing into convex polyhedra! Besides the obvious aesthetic benefits of having a set of platonic applehedra of your own, they are also good for slicing and truncating. I used Granny Smiths because they have firm flesh and don't brown as fast as some types of apples (of course one could also use other fruits... see bottom of page!). Making these was an interesting exercize for me mathematically, because though I knew intellectually how to slice a sphere to have the slice intersect a set of points, it felt a bit unintuitive to actually do. Perhaps the easiest platonic solid to carve is the cube, not because it is the simplest (that honor goes to the tetrahedron) but because it is the most familiar. It's also great for slicing into hexagons .
Vi Hart: Mathematical Food
The Unique Brain Anatomy of Meditation Practitioners: Alterations in Cortical Gyrification | Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
1 Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, Department of Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, USA 2 Department of Medicine, Center for Neurobiology of Stress, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, USA 3 Department of Psychiatry, University of Jena, Jena, Germany 4 Department of Neurology, University of Jena, Jena, Germany Several cortical regions are reported to vary in meditation practitioners. However, prior analyses have focused primarily on examining gray matter or cortical thickness. Thus, additional effects with respect to other cortical features might have remained undetected.This is just one more awesome thing Wolfram Alpha is capable of: it can take a jumbled set of letters and tell you what Scrabble words you can make with them. It's Friday, and if you're spending your last weekday trying to beat your mom at Words With Friends (like I am), Wolfram Alpha has a hidden little tool to help you out. Just type "scrabble" into its search bar, hit "computation" in the results, and it'll bring up a Scrabble word calculator. Just type in the letters you have (include any spaces for blank tiles) and it'll tell you what words you can make, including how many points they'd be worth. Sure, it's probably technically cheating, but I won't tell if you don't, okay?
Use Wolfram Alpha to Find Scrabble Words
by Maria Popova What the free speech movement of the 1960s has to do with digital learning and The Beatles. Education is something we’re deeply passionate about, but the fact remains that today’s dominant formal education model is a broken system based on antiquated paradigms. While much has been said and written about education reform over the past couple of years, the issue and the public discourse around it are hardly new phenomena.
7 Must-Read Books on Education
If you spend a lot of effort in having a vegetable or flower garden, seeing aphids or lacewings on prized plants sends most people out to their local big box home improvement center for conventional or organic insecticides. Using insecticides will kill both prey insects like aphids and lacewings that eat your plants but also predator insects such as ladybugs that feed on prey insects. It may be better just to leave the plans alone and let the predator insects do their job. Homesteading magazine Mother Earth News' weblog makes the case that using insecticide is a bad idea in the long run as prey insects multiply quickly enough that after a few generations (for insects this can be just a few years or even months) they have build up an immunity to the insecticides and you have killed off beneficial predator insects as they have a lower reproductive rate than prey insects and are more susceptible to being wiped out by insecticides.
Ignoring Garden Pest Insects Can Work Better Than Insecticide
What the Research on Habit Formation Reveals About Willpower (And How You Can Apply it to Your Life)
In the past decade, there has been a lot of fascinating academic research conducted around habit formation and willpower. By examining things like how smokers quit, why student perform well, and how New Year's resolvers stay on track, researchers are starting to piece together the answers to how we can build lasting habits and improve our ability to resist temptation. One surprising result is this: to improve your overall well-being, start a new regular habit.
Dear Lifehacker, With all the hullaballoo about Carrier IQ spying on all those phones , I'm left wondering what else is my phone gathering about me? Should I be concerned, and if so, what should I do about it? Signed, Not Trying To Be Paranoid Dear NTTBP, A healthy dose of skepticism is, well, healthy, and you're definitely not alone in wondering what kind of private information your phone is gathering and what's being done with it. The CarrierIQ rootkit is the most recent of many mobile privacy and security concerns that have been raised (though particularly worrisome because it comes preinstalled on your phone, and removing it can be difficult).
I Know My Phone's "Spying" on Me, But How Bad Is It?
Bulleted advantages | Bitcoin Media
Whenever discussing bitcoin, I always keep these points in mind. During discussion, I make sure to cover each point and not dwell on any one topic unless the other person is engaged. Belief systems are constructed from ideas and concepts, so to convey the importance of bitcoin, you need to show that the system does not offer any one incremental advantage, but a veritable smorgasbord of new concepts never encountered before in history. Decentralised and free from control No regulations: while the advantages of decentralization might not seem at first apparent, consider that a decentralized structure constitutes an incorruptible medium. This is the first time we have such technology.Lasersaur Manual - MainPage
This manual is the main resource for both building and maintaining a Lasersaur laser cutter. The basic idea is, when you build it you can easily maintain it. The other idea is that an open source design can improve over time through the collaboration of many people. We hope in three years it will have evolved to the point where it has multiple robotic arms sticking out capable of building space stations :) DISCLAIMER: Please be aware that operating a self-built laser cutter can be dangerous and requires full awareness of the risks involved. NORTD Labs does not warrant for any contents of the manual and does not assume any risks whatsoever with regard to the contents of this manual or the machine assembled by you.