Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for August 14, 2019

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Authored by @remlaps

Verizon sells Tumblr to WordPress parent company; Left-handedness and creativity; A new super-supercomputer (super2) for the US nuclear stockpile; Commodore's forgotten UNIX platform; A Steem essay describing the Harmony blockchain
Straight from my RSS feed:
!!! Whatever gets my attention !!!

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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  1. Verizon offloads Tumblr to owner of WordPress - I wonder if this means that @steempress will soon work with Tumblr... Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, and was subsequently purchased by Verizon in 2017. Now, Verizon sold Tumblr to WordPress parent company, Automattic Inc, for less than $20 million. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said in a Tumblr Post that blending the two complementary businesses is a "once in a generation opportunity. See also: Verizon selling Tumblr to WordPress.com owner, but porn ban won’t go away.

  2. Are Left-Handed People Really More Creative? - Scientists have looked for links between left-handedness and a variety of things ranging from creativity to mental illness, and the results have been inconclusive. Some studies find links. Others don't. The article also points out that most people aren't truly right or left-handed, but we all favor both hands for different purposes. It then suggests that the degree of preference for one hand or the other may be more important then which hand is dominant. Noting that studies have found that people near the middle of the spectrum may be more flexible, empathetic, and better able to view things from another's perspective.

  3. The US nuclear stockpile will be managed by a $600 million supercomputer that's more powerful than the top 100 supercomputers combined - Cray's El Capitan supercomputer is slated for delivery to the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration in 2022. The machine costs $600 million dollars, and plans call for it to be more powerful than today's top-100 supercomputers. El Capitan will be used to run 3D modeling to show how nuclear weapons age.

  4. Commodore/CBM900 - I cut my teeth on a Commodore 64 computer in the 1980s, and spent most of my career (to date) working on UNIX systems, so it's interesting to see that Commodore's forgotten UNIX workstation, the Z machine or Commodore 900 is preserved in Denmark's Data Museum. Approximately 300-500 prototypes were built, and recalled for destruction when the company decided not to pursue the product, but this one somehow escaped the chopping block. h/t OS news

  5. STEEM Harmony! a revolutionary Blockchain based on fragmentation - In this entry for the CateredContent contest, @joseangelvs discusses the Harmony blockchain. According to the post, Harmony is a proof of stake blockchain that makes use of fragmentation and claims to achieve linear scalability. The post discusses Harmony from the perspectives of security, scalability, reliability, economy, and speed, then describes three potential use cases centered around a pet shop, video games, and digital marketing. (A 10% beneficiary setting for @joseangelvs has been assigned to this post.)

In order to help make Steem the go to place for timely information on diverse topics, I invite you to discuss any of these links in the comments and/or your own response post.

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