Hackaday Newsletter 0x28

Get ready for a revolution in access to scientific knowledge [HACKADAY]( Weird Al’s Monster Battlestation Is Now Just A Reasonably Fast PC [Read Article Now»]( Separating Ideas From Words By [Elliot Williams]( We covered [Malamud's General Index]( this week, and Mike and I were talking about it [on the podcast]( as well. It's the boldest attempt we've seen so far to open up scientific knowledge for everyone, and not just the wealthiest companies and institutions. The trick is how to do that without running afoul of copyright law, because the results of research are locked inside their literary manifestations -- the journal articles. The Index itself is composed of one-to-five-word snippets of 107,233,728 scientific articles. So if you're looking for everything the world knows about "tincture of iodine", you can find all the papers that mention it, but also important keywords from the corpus and associated metadata like the ISBN of the article. It's like the searchable card catalog of, well, everything. And it's freely downloadable if you've got a couple terabytes of storage to spare. That alone is incredible. What I think is most remarkable is this makes good on figuring out how to separate scientific ideas from their prison --- the words in which they're written -- which are subject to copyright. Indeed, if you look into [US copyright law]( it's very explicit about not wanting to harm the free sharing of ideas. "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work." But this has always been paradoxical. How do you restrict dissemination of the papers without restricting dissemination of the embodied ideas or results? In the olden days, you could tell others about the results, but that just doesn't scale. Until today, only the richest companies and institutions had access to this bird's eye view of scientific research -- similar datasets gleaned from Google's book-scanning program have trained their AIs and seeded their search machines, but they only give you [a useless and limited peek](. Of course, if you want to read the entirety of particular papers under copyright, you still have to pay for them. And that's partly the point, because the General Index is not meant to destroy copyrights, but give you access to the underlying knowledge despite the real world constraints on implementing copyright law, and we think that stands to be revolutionary. From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [The Pi Zero 2 W is the Most Efficient Pi]( By [Elliot Williams]( How much power does the new Pi Zero 2 require per CPU cycle? Its a winner. [Read more »]( [30 Days of Terror: the Logistics of Launching the James Webb Space Telescope]( By [Dan Maloney]( The much delayed successor to the Hubble has 200 things that all need to go right. [Read more »]( [Keep Calm and Hack On: The Philosophy of Calm Technology]( By [Michael Shaub]( We all like the occasional blinking light, but as we surround ourselves with tech, how much is too much? [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast 143: More Magnesium Please, Robot Bicep Curls, Malamud’s General Index, and Are You Down with EMC?]( By [Hackaday Editors]( What happened last week on Hackaday? Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [Dante’s Inferno Arcade Reveals Your True Fate]( [A Builders Guide For The Perfect Solid-State Tesla Coil]( [Janksy Robot Paints Murals One Dot at a Time]( [Flying Blind: Taking Flight Simulation To A New Level In Accessibility]( [Big RGB LED Cube You Can Build Too]( [Hackaday]( NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA