Girlfriend killed by lightning minutes before Knoxville man's proposal

Holy shit. This is my worst nightmare. When I propose to my girlfriend, I’ll make sure to do it somewhere where we won’t be likely to be hit by lightning.

Chromium OS Builds for non-Chromebook Machines!

So excited for this. A user going by the name of hexxeh has created a website which automatically builds the latest versions of Google’s Chromium OS. I downloaded an image, but unfortunately, the latest builds don’t work on my machine. I get a kernel panic upon boot. I’ll try it on my brother’s laptop later, and hopefully that will work.

BUT, the most important thing is that hexxeh was able to get Chromium OS working on his Raspberry Pi! I have one ordered and will hopefully get one within the next month. Very excited about that.

Troll pi explained

Ever seen this image?

If so, you may have found yourself wondering how exactly this conclusion is false. Over at qntm.org, the reasoning behind why this approach is fallacious is explained through a mathematical proof. To summarize extremely, making an infinite amount of jagged edges never makes a circle. The edges should all be reduced to a straight line wrapped around a circle for the perimeter to be the correct number, which is pi.

Read more by following the link!

Running Javascript as fast as native code

I was reading a discussion today on Ars Technica about Google’s Native Client project, or NaCl for short. (That’s such a clever name!) One of the issues discussed was the current major speed difference between run-time JavaScript compilation and pre-compiled binaries.

Long story short, a user made a point that JavaScript could never be as fast as native code even in theory due to the fact that high-level interpreted languages have plenty of overhead and implicit data types. Another user responded with the above link, which links to the blog of a Mozilla developer who explains how one could convert any JavaScript code into Python code, and in turn convert that Python code into a C binary which is native machine code. The speed difference was negligible between the JavaScript-turned-binary and the equivalent code in C.

The significance behind this is that a browser could theoretically do this conversion on-the-fly when a page is loaded, at a cost of initial loading time for the JavaScript file. The author suggests that the normal JavaScript be executed as soon as it is downloaded, and perform the conversion on another thread. When the conversion is done, attempt to hot-swap the interpreted JavaScript code with the freshly converted binary for a speed boost. If even this cannot be done, the browser could at least cache the compiled script and re-use it whenever the user loads that website again.

Very neat article! It’s interesting all the different ways one can get a speed boost in their web browser.

Glenn Beck: Youth Camp Attacked In Norway "Sounds A Little Like The Hitler Youth"

South Park hides an alien in each episode.

Car bomb detonated in Norway kills 17, wounds more. A car bomb exploded in Oslo, Norway today outside the Norwegian prime minister’s office. As of writing, the number of people dead from the attack has hit 17, with many more injured from flying glass and other shrapnel. In another incident on Utøya Island, a man dressed as a police officer began firing on children at a summer camp created by the Labour Party, which is the current ruling party in Norway. Some people speculate that this man was also present at the bombing in Oslo, suggesting that this is a Unabomber-esque attack. A man (photo) was arrested for the shooting at Utøya. His name is Anders Behring Breivik. A one-time Freemason, he is a far-right conservative Christian with some extremist political ties. Oh man. I hope this was just a lone-wolf act rather than a coordinated terrorist act from a group. My condolences go out to all you Norwegians.
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Car bomb detonated in Norway kills 17, wounds more.

A car bomb exploded in Oslo, Norway today outside the Norwegian prime minister’s office. As of writing, the number of people dead from the attack has hit 17, with many more injured from flying glass and other shrapnel.

In another incident on Utøya Island, a man dressed as a police officer began firing on children at a summer camp created by the Labour Party, which is the current ruling party in Norway. Some people speculate that this man was also present at the bombing in Oslo, suggesting that this is a Unabomber-esque attack.

A man (photo) was arrested for the shooting at Utøya. His name is Anders Behring Breivik. A one-time Freemason, he is a far-right conservative Christian with some extremist political ties.

Oh man. I hope this was just a lone-wolf act rather than a coordinated terrorist act from a group. My condolences go out to all you Norwegians.

No, really, pi is wrong. Tau is the circle constant.

Michael Hartl writes a convincing manifesto which posits that the mathematical constant pi (π) is not the true circle constant. He proposes a new constant, tau (τ), to be used in equations where pi was previously used. Here is the defining difference between π and τ:

π = C / d , where C is the circumference of a circle, and d is the diameter of the circle.

τ = C / r , where C is the circumference of a circle, and r is the radius of the circle.

Since r is half of d, this means that τ is effectively 2π. Where is this number seen? Oh, right, 2π is the amount of radians it takes to complete a circle, equivalent to 360 degrees. τ is a turn of a circle.

Read the Tau Manifesto to learn more of the reasoning behind using tau instead of pi in the math world.

The death of a neuron: what is the electrical activity observed after decapitation?

When a research animal needs to be killed for studying, researchers try to find the most humane way to kill the animal. However, sometimes the animal can’t be anesthetized in order to preserve the normal chemical balance in the brain, so at times researchers will decapitate the animals. Is this humane?

Multiple studies over past years have noticed that there is a spike in sum electrical activity in the brain (this is called an electroencephalogram, or EEG) around thirty seconds after decapitation. Does this mean that for a few seconds the animal might have some sort of consciousness or pain felt after death? Read more to read more about the possible cause behind this phenomenon.

edit: Found a neat picture of a small animal guillotine. I would hate to have to use one of those.

Former Reddit co-owner arrested for data theft against JSTOR

Aaron Swartz, one of the co-owners of Reddit and one of the authors of RSS, has been arrested today for downloading over four million documents from online journal site JSTOR. He used Internet access at MIT to download the articles with a Python script. His plan was to make science articles and other documents freely accessible online without having to pay JSTOR for the data.

JSTOR has decided not to press charges, but Swartz is still under arrest for breaking into an MIT building.