Links: 2015 — 7

Some links, and then some personal news, including photos from my niece’s 2nd birthday.

• This short video on cumulus cloud formation might well include details that are new to you.
• Interesting article on training the brain to overcome a learned disease. (I pointed out an error in the comments, but it seems the author had stopped monitoring comments a few days before.)
• Another interesting article on the use of vagus nerve stimulation to moderate the immune system, among other things.
• One of the best articles I’ve seen about Emmy Noether. It doesn’t try to answer every question, but gives a sense of why the questions are significant.
• This fifteen minute online David Attenborough documentary on plankton is not only educational, but relaxing as well.
• Stars collided in 1670.
• Which direction water swirls doesn’t normally depend on which hemisphere you’re in … but what if you eliminate all other variables?
• From now on, if your balloon animals don’t look like these, you’re doing it wrong.
• I found a tool that takes a Google Maps route and generates an elevation chart. (If you just want to know the elevation for a single location, try this.)
• I’ve never used Python, but I’m making a note of this in case I want to some day.

On 28 May, my parents and I took my niece to Cleland Wildlife Park for her second birthday (she was born on 26 May 2013). I’ll share more anecdotes about that day if you ask, but for now, here are some photos of Elke with koalas and wallabies. More family interaction followed the next day, including some errand-running. Of particular importance to me was that I finally got my mobile phone fixed, after errant software had been draining the batteries since late last year. When the phone was new, the battery lost on average less than 5% capacity for every 8 hours of normal (i.e. mostly idle) use, and now that it is fixed I can confirm that it loses only marginally more than that. Given that it’s more than a year old and the battery has never been replaced, this must count as excellent. While it was broken, I was lucky to get two days out of it.

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