Thursday "interesting things" post
Yikes, it's been a while since I had the time to catch upon Thursday posts. Life seriously just got in the way of things. But as usual, my sincere thanks to everyone's continued support of the newsletter!
For this week, since the kid has imported another plague from school already and that's got me flat on my back, I'll just run through some of the more interesting things taking up tab space in my browser of late.
To start things off, today I saw a cool publication float by my Bluesky feed, a big survey paper on Tokenization! It's HUGE at over 97 pages worth of text before it even gets into citations. I seriously haven't looked at tokenization since the mid 2000s in a basic NLP class and let's just say the methods back then were primitive. It'd be a good way to catch up on things.
Marco Cognetta
A couple of days ago I also came across just a discussion of Heart Rate Variability metrics on wearable fitness trackers. I've noticed the HRV stat on mine is very loosely negatively correlated with how sick I'm feeling on a given day, but this more detailed dive into things helped confirm my suspicions that it was just a cute correlation and nothing solid.
Eric Topol
Moving on to more fun stuff....
There's a mosaic of the images taken of the galactic center by all sorts of telescopes! You can zoom in to ridiculous detail, and also toggle on/off images from the different cameras of JWST, which each individually are sensitive to different wavelengths and thus can see through the obscuring dust clouds that had traditionally hidden much of that area from view. You can toggle images from ALMA radio telescopes, as well as a ton of other overlays. The main site of this project is here at JWST-GC, but the direct link to the viewer is below.
Also, I've always wanted to affirmatively answer the meme question "Would you download a car?" and came across a project to create a 3d-printable RC car design (which you can buy the files for here). It's super involved and I'm not sure I can commit to the whole project of making one just for the novelty of it, but it's... definitely a temptation.
Watching the video really drives home that if I want to learn to model moving/mechanical parts, I'm going to have to move from using Rhinoceros 3D, which is great for static NURBs modeling, to something like Solidworks and/or Fusion360 in the future. *sigh
Finally, this has been sitting in my browser for a while now, there's a web site where people can report seeing fireballs (aka, shooting stars/meteors) in the sky. It's just one of those random citizen science projects that are just fascinating to observe what's being collected.
Also, apparently video games have lined up to distract me. I'm in the middle of working my way through Final Fantasy 7 Remake (after dropping it a few years ago). This time I studied the annoying combat system and might actually finish it. Then I completely forgot that Ace Combat 8 comes out literally today, and I'm a sucker for unrealistic flight games full of pew pew pew. I promise I'll keep writing normally through the distractions though!