Happy Monday!
My NaNoWriMo progress has been a bit up-and-down this past week, but I have crossed 25,000 words! Past the halfway mark! My characters are so alive that they practically need birth certificates, and they are making me have to really think about plot. It’s certainly exciting, but certainly hard, because I’ve never gotten this far before! Ever!
Anyway, onto our links!
This twitter thread about PURRS - Pet-Based Urban Rapid Response to Shaking. A proposition for Fitbit-style earthquake trackers attached to cats, to produce a crowdsourced early-warning system for earthquakes. This idea is so crazy, it might just work!
Researchers from NYU and Michigan State have come up with a way to create ‘master fingerprints’ to unlock smartphones. They use Generalized Adversarial Networks (a kind of machine learning system) which can take a database of fingerprints and generate a general fingerprint image that will match at least one of the fingerprints in the database. The full paper is here. I haven’t read it yet, but I do want to. Eventually I wonder if we can just etch it on vinyl, maybe with Cricut or something, and then sell it in packs of stickers that you can just stick on when you need one. Isn’t that scary?
Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the founder of the prestigious Banaras Hindu University, is also who helped end the ‘girmitiya’ system of indentured labor, where the British would take Indian laborers to work in the fields in Fiji, when the slave trade ended. I found this article in a Fijian newspaper, and it’s sparked in me an interest in learning more about him. It’s annoying this isn’t something I learned in history in school.
ICYMI I went through a paper on how vacations spark innovation, and thought about how it might apply to my own life. I realized this is the polar opposite of how NaNoWriMo novels are written! Now I’m wondering about following this paper’s example, and might try to model author behavior for NaNoWriMo in the future.
GIF of the week: A bear got stuck in a tree! Here’s some nice people rescuing it.