...insomnia, data compression, and spinach proteins.

So, yeah. Tired all day. Finally come home and crash around 2000. Wake up at 0030. I guess that's what happens when you treat your body like a temple... a temple to the god of trash, that is.

So, I saw some pretty screenshots of a h-gore game. It's been quite a few years since I have played one, as I am busy cramming garbage into my head, garbage into my lungs, and garbage into my stomach. So, I checked the 2-part .rars and then unrar'd them to a directory (I use 7z which is broad-encompassing etc). After getting Daemon Tools Lite (and having AVG pop up telling me that a component was malware categorized as a downloader... and i thusly removed that part w/o changing functionality of DTL as far as i can tell) and installing the game, I figured that I might zip it up and keep an archive in case it was a good game.

So, I right click on the game and the English patch and add them to a 7z archive. There are lots of options to choose from (although the main ones are LZMA, LZMA2, and PPMd), and, of course, I have not a goddamn clue which to choose. Wiki'd.

I never seem to leave Wiki without visiting at least an additional reference page. Today was no exception, as I read about ZPAQ compression and BARF.

Comparison

The following table is a sample from the Large Text Compression Benchmark by Matt Mahoney that consists of a file consisting of 10⁹ bytes (1GB or 0.931GiB) of Wikipedia English text.

Program	Compressed size (bytes)	% of original size	Compression time	Memory
PAQ8HP8	133,423,109	13.34	64 639 sec.	1849 MiB
PPMd	183,976,014	18.4	880 sec.	256 MiB
bzip2	254,007,875	25.4	379 sec.	8 MiB
InfoZIP	322,649,703	32.26	104 sec.	0.1 MiB

See Comparison of file archivers for a list of file compression benchmarks.

I was impressed, so I am giving it a try.  Please note, however, the compression time is large.    FUCKING HUGE OH DEAR GOD FUCK
P.S.: 64649 seconds = 17.96 hours

Plenty of time leads to the inquisitive mind's inquisition.  You now have that song stuck in your head.

Better Archiver with Recursive Functionality (BARF)

The BARF compressor will compress any nonempty file by at least one byte. Thus, by compressing already compressed files over and over again, it is possible to eventually reduce any file to 0 bytes.
BARF has been tested on the Calgary corpus, a well known benchmark. In just one pass, it achieves the best known result of any compressor, compressing all 14 files to 1 byte each. Run time is under 1 second on a 750 MHz PC. Of course these files can be compressed again down to 0 bytes each, just like any other file. (Yes, they can be decompressed correctly).
BARF is free, open source software, released under the GNU GPL.
Download BARF! (Windows executable, about 1 MB).


...skipping to the bottom of the page...

Update

BARF2 (Oct. 5, 2010) iteratively compresses random data down to 0 bytes and restores it correctly without hiding data in the decompresser or in the filename. (GPL source and Windows .exe included).

 lol'd

dubba-relink'd from slashdot:
The team discovered that the proteins in spinach are capable of self-assembly with polymers in a synthetic membrane structure. This means they can produce hydrogen from water in the presence of sunlight, and in essence, the spinach-membrane acts as a sort of hydrogen producing solar-panel.
The researchers used an innovative technique called “small angle neutron scattering” at ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor to produce the hydrogen. Speaking about the process, ORNL researcher Hugh O’Neill, of the lab’s Center for Structural Molecular Biology said, “Making a self-repairing synthetic photo-conversion system is a pretty tall order. The ability to control structure and order in these materials for self-repair is of interest because, as the system degrades, it loses its effectiveness.”
ORNL researchers previously determined the light conversion properties of platinized photosystem I complexes and are basing their current research on that data.  “We’re building on the photosynthesis research to explore the development of self-assembly in biohybrid systems,” O’Neill said. “The neutron studies give us direct evidence that this is occurring.”


Go Oak Ridge!  For no reason!  Interrogatives! Daguerreotypes! oh shit, thanks for reminding me to Ophcrack?  Thanks me, presenting to you, me, and everyone else.  You.  Me.  Yume.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100998/usercomments?filter=hate  :(