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Monday Links from the Sheriff's Lair vol. CCLVIII

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    Monday Links from the Sheriff's Lair vol. CCLVIII

    Foul lurgy attacked me over the weekend Still, I've managed to get to ClientCorp so I can invoice while convalescing.
    • The Modest Victorian Proposal to Electroplate Corpses Into Beautiful Statues - Whatever you might say about the Victorians, they had some great ideas for embracing new technology: ”You may be wondering, but what of the rotting flesh within? Wouldn't your golden grandpa start smelling up the place after a time? Well, assuming all was done well, it should be no problem.”

    • Aliens in the Valley - A detailed history of Reddit: ”This is the story of how a bootstrapped startup with a funny name and no initial ties to the tech scene outlasted better-funded competitors, survived founder drama, endured tensions with its parent company and later navigated life as a standalone business — all in order to build the front page of the Internet. Traffic doubled year after year, even in the worst of times, with the site now reaching 175 million users per month.”

    • Building the Westway 1964-1970 - "On the 28th July 1970, Michael Heseltine, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport couldn’t fail to hear shouts of “philistine!” while he was trying to cut a white ribbon that would mark the opening of, at the time, the longest elevated motorway in Britain… Heseltine was heard to repeatedly apologise and tried to out yell the raucous residents: “we want to help you, we will help you,”. He continued, “you cannot but have sympathy for these people.” The Borough of Kensington had blamed the GLC and the GLC at first said it was nothing to do with them to re-house or compensate anyone and then changed their excuse to the lack of funds. Whosever fault it was the local working class residents who lived up against the motorway felt like they had been totally forgotten about.”

    • The Case of Thomas Weir - "As far as his Edinburgh neighbours were concerned, Major Thomas Weir had a reputation as a devout Calvinist whose constant preaching earned him the nickname of the "Bowhead Saint”… Certainly, he was the last person anyone would guess might be executed for what would be called "one of the most astounding and terrible cases in the whole annals of Scottish Witchcraft."”

    • Custom Sony Malware Indicates Previous Knowledge - A fairly detailed analysis of teh Sony malware, showing that those responsible either had inside information, or had long had access to the company’s internal networks: ”The first sample reviewed is a worm by definition that spreads via SMB (md5: 2618dd3e5c59ca851f03df12c0cab3b8). Inside was a text file that contained over 10,000 mappings between internal host names and IP addresses. This indicates the attackers had already performed recon of the network and knew what machines they were interested in targeting. Further indication of the attacker’s previous infiltration is from the use of credentials that were hard coded into the sample. This indicates that previous access was obtained before this sample was deployed, but more importantly that it was designed specifically for Sony’s network.”

    • Here's What Happens When You Light a Fire in Space - ""Strange flames" on the International Space Station" HT to quackhandle for this one

    • Nine hard-won lessons about money and investing - Google’s Matt Cutts takes a break from his anti-spam crusade to offer some advice about dosh: ”Any time you talk about money, you risk sounding like a jerk. I’m going to take that risk in this post. I’ll start out by talking about a couple ways I shot myself in the foot financially and what I learned as a result. Your mileage may vary.”

    • Living African group discovered to be the most populous humans over the last 150,000 years - "New genetic research reveals that a small group of hunter-gatherers now living in Southern Africa once was so large that it comprised the majority of living humans during most of the past 150,000 years." Don’t tell the BNP

    • Electric Eels Can Remotely Control Their Prey’s Muscles - Scientist Kenneth Catania has studied how electric ells actually work: ”He filmed them with a high-speed camera and noticed something remarkable. When the eels approached their prey, they released an intense volley of high-voltage pulses—around 400 a second. These pulses completely freeze the prey, and that’s when the eel lunges. If the fish isn’t paralysed, the strike would miss.”

    • Ruins in reverse: Ciudad Valdeluz, Spain - "It was the American artist Robert Smithson who, in 1967, first coined the phrase ‘ruins in reverse’ when describing some of the strange forms he encountered in the post-industrial landscape around his home town of Passaic… One such site is the commuter town of Valdeluz, 40 miles northeast of Spain’s capital, Madrid.” A town intended for 30,000 people, with a population of just 2,500. Here’s the Central Plaza:



    Happy invoicing!

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