That was how one MTA New York City Transit source with knowledge of the situation described the latest curiosity to befall the city’s beleaguered subway. Eleven minutes later, a New York City Transit employee on duty at 14th St-Union Square (one express stop uptown from Brooklyn Bridge) spotted another “surfer” on the back of an uptown 6 local train as it left the station. Every New York City Transit employee gave the same description of the “surfer” they saw riding the back of the train or darting across the tracks: young, male, wearing black clothing and white sneakers.

This makes Washington the first US state legislature to approve human composting as an alternative “burial” option in a process called “recomposition” (which sounds more heartening than “decomposition” and emphasizes the environmental friendliness of this method). Concerned about crowded cemeteries and the environmental effects of disposing of remains through cremation, Spade came up with the notion of recomposition for human remains and began designing a space that would serve this process. This was traditionally used for medical cadavers and basically involves dissolving bodies in a highly accelerated decomposition process that takes a few hours, leaving only bones, which are dried in a convection oven and pressed into powder, then handed over to the family just like ashes from traditional cremation.

Serenity is a love letter to ’90s user interfaces, with a custom Unix-like core. Go into the Toolchain/ directory and run the BuildIt.sh script. Otherwise, see the older step-by-step guide to building Serenity

Come chat in on the Freenode IRC network.

After a series of delays, the federal government is now saying it will this month publish a long-promised rule to strip spouses of H-1B visa holders of their right to work. Under certain circumstances, rules can be finalized without a comment period, but Citizenship and Immigration director L. Francis Cissna said in a Sept. 6 letter to the Internet Association — which represents major tech firms such as Facebook and Google — that “the public will be given an opportunity to provide feedback during a notice and comment period on any revisions to regulations that DHS determines are appropriate, including revisions relating to the H-4 Rule.” Homeland Security, on the unified agenda page dedicated to the work-ban plan, has said that some U.S. workers would benefit from the prohibition “by having a better chance at obtaining jobs that some of the population of the H-4 workers currently hold.”

The ideal reward is the infinite sum:

The model must be fixed for these surprisals to be well-defined, since the states depend on the actions taken. Inverse Dynamics concatenates each state’s feature vector with the subsquent state’s feature vector, feeds that through two Dense layers, and uses a Softmax Cross Entropy to decide which action was taken. The rollout contains 129 states, surprisals, and rewards estimated from the Policy network.

There’s a large community of planespotting photographers around the world who camp out at airports to photograph airplanes arriving and departing. A major airport in Canada has decided to serve its local photographers by creating dedicated holes in its fences for camera lenses to poke through. Jean-Lesage International Airport of Quebec, Canada’s 11th busiest airport, announced last week that it has partnered with the Quebec-based planespotting community YQB Aviation to install special panels around the perimeter of the airport to provide photographers with a variety of views of runways and the tarmac.

The symposium speakers included Ed Lazowska, Allen Tucker, Andrea Danyluk (of Williams College and the CS2013 committee), Valerie Barr (who had revived Union College’s computer science program)—and, of course me. On May 2, Albert wrote to all the symposium speakers:

Before the symposium, this group also fielded questions about typical CS search timelines as Whitman College geared up to hire its founding computer scientist. On July 3, I received an invitation from President Bridges to call him on his cell phone so he could “learn [my] reactions to the meeting devoted to Computer Science here at Whitman and some ideas we are considering for the first faculty hire.”

Anna Zawisza, director of community relations and strategic partnership with Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado (VOC), the state’s oldest and largest organizer of trail crews, ranks trail-runner turnout right down there with public-trail-riding equestrians, which, to be fair to the horse people, constitute a niche group compared to the scrawny Forrest Gump set. To really understand why mountain bikers are gung ho volunteers and trail runners are lazy parasites, it helps to look at the origins of the two sports. According to Mary Monroe Brown, the group’s executive director, Trail 2000’s volunteers break down as follows: 40 percent mountain bikers, 35 percent hikers, and 25 percent trail runners.

Here is an example of a Terraform configuration showing some new language features:

We have many resources available for 0.12 for new and existing users. Prior versions of Terraform reduced plan output to a flat list of key, value pairs, even when using resource types with deeply-nested configuration blocks. Terraform 0.12 has an entirely new plan renderer which integrates with Terraform’s new type system to show changes in a form that resembles the configuration language, and which indicates nested structures by indentation:

Along with reflecting the natural configuration hierarchy in the plan output, Terraform will also show line-oriented diffs for multiline strings and will parse and show structural diffs for JSON strings, both of which have been big pain points for plan readability in prior versions.

Rogue emissions of a gas that harms the ozone layer are coming from eastern China, primarily from two heavily industrialized provinces, an international team of researchers said Wednesday. The findings confirm what many scientists, environmental groups and policymakers had suspected after an initial study a year ago reported new global emissions of the gas, CFC-11, but could only locate the source generally as East Asia. It also confirms the results of several investigations, including one by The New York Times, which found evidence that factories in Shandong, one of the provinces specified in the study, were still making or using the gas to manufacture foam insulation.