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Monday Links from Santa's Grotto vol. CCLX

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    Monday Links from Santa's Grotto vol. CCLX

    Lots of time off? Good; you'll need it to make the most of exploring this lot
    • 85 Years, 85 Ideas - Bloomberg Business Week presents what it believes to be “the most disruptive ideas” of the last 85 years. Whether or not you agree that the red tab on Levi’s jeans was a momentous event, I’m sure cat lovers everywhere will confirm that the introduction of cat litter in 1954 changed the world for the better. Thanks to quackhandle for this one

    • Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies - If you’re stuck at home with overexcited kids this week, get them in the kitchen making stuff for you to eat with Tessa Arias’ recipe: ”These cookies have my version of the ultimate texture combination: thick, super chewy, soft and a little gooey in the middle, crisp and slightly crunchy at the edges, with ooey chocolate chips throughout. Does anything get better than that? I don’t think so. I would want these cookies to be a part of my last meal on earth, that’s how much I love them!”

    • Home Computers Behind The Iron Curtain - Martin Malý on the joys of 80s computing in Czechoslovakia: "There were a lot of skilled and clever people in eastern countries, but they had a lot of problems with the elementary technical things. Manufacturing of electronics parts was divided into diverse countries of Comecon – The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. In reality, it led to an absurd situation: You could buy the eastern copy of Z80 (made in Eastern Germany as U880D), but you couldn’t buy 74LS00 at the same time. Yes, a lot of manufacturers made it, but “it is out of stock now; try to ask next year”."

    • Strong Language - Excellent new blog about the linguistics of swearing: ”tulip can mean many things, sometimes almost neutral (as a synonym for stuff, for example) but usually negative (as a synonym for feces). But by adding “the,” we get the one instance where tulip has a positive connotation. Does that make it a contronym?” I have to link to the home page, because CUK’s naughty words filter would completely screw up the URLs for posts like What the **** is the “the” in “the ****”?, Ip, Dip, Dog tulip in Early Medieval Ireland, and Great moments in swearing: You gotta be ****in’ kidding

    • A Year in the Metabolist Future of 1972 - Architects Ana Luisa Soares and Filipe Magalhães reflect on a year living in Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower: ”Yet even before it was completed the Nakagin Tower was hopelessly out of date. It is in the unfortunate position of being the first and last architecture of its kind to ever reach completion. Forty years have passed and today it is easy to see how the building got lost in dull day-to-day routine. It is stuck. Old and decaying, obscured in the shadow of the new skyscrapers. Today the Nakagin is but a vibrant reminder of a path that was not followed, a sculptural ode to an unrealised future.” (The server on which this site is hosted seems to be a bit flaky at the moment, but reload a couple of times and it should get there in the end.)

    • The Genealogy of Eliza - Jeff Shrager of Stanford University maintains this site cataloguing versions of Joseph Weizenbaum’s seminal LISP program that pretends to be a Rogerian analyst. He’s recently added a 1966 version pulled from old paper tapes (the oldest known surviving version) which is available on GitHub. The recovery of this version prompted Jeff Barrett to reminisce, as noted by Zach Beane: "We had a Raytheon 704 computer in the speech lab that I thought we could use to keep visitors happy some of the time. So one weekend I wrote an interpretive Lisp system for the 704 and debugged it the next Monday. The sole purpose of this Lisp was to support Eliza. Someone else adopted the Q32 version to run on the new 704 Lisp. So in less than a week, while doing our normal work, we had a new Lisp system running Eliza and keeping visitors happy while we did our research."

    • The Lost World of British Tape Recording Clubs - Great MetaFilter post on assorted archives of British sound recordings from the 1960s and 70s: ”Over the years, Vernon has acquired other archives and put together radio shows, oral histories, and a compilation CD. Listen to the lost sound-scapes of The Leicester tape recording club; the Nottingham Cooperative tape recording club; and the London tape recording club.”

    • Tudor dining: a guide to food and status in the 16th century - "In Tudor England, maintaining the difference between ranks was so important to the concept of a well-ordered society that efforts were made to enshrine the distinctions between the classes in ‘sumptuary’ laws… for aspiring courtiers who spent fortunes trying to outdo one other in lavish display, the sumptuary law was very relevant indeed. Failure to obey it could earn you a fine, as well as contempt for trying to ‘ape your betters’.” And you thought Christmas dinner with the in-laws could be a minefield

    • Make ‘Em Laugh - "A treasury of comic monologues, recitations and poems from Music Hall to the present day." The site also includes A casquet of vocal gems from the golden days of Music Hall: "This, quite unique, collection of song lyrics has been put together, over a 12 year period, by a small group of friends and music hall enthusiasts. Most of the songs would have been popular between the years 1860 - 1920.” If you’re tempted to declare that Christmas TV is tulip, have a look at this stuff and be thankful you didn’t live a century ago

    • Slut-Shaming, Eugenics, and Donald Duck: The Scandalous History of Sex-Ed Movies - Lisa Hix on sex education and the movies: ”In 1914, a short silent film called “Damaged Goods” addressed the topic on the silver screen for the first time… it told the story of a man who has sex with a prostitute the night before his wedding and gets syphilis. He visits a doctor who takes him on a tour of the hospital filled with patients tormented by the disease and its sores. When his baby is born with syphilis, he commits suicide.” (You can find quite a few 1940s and 50s films of this ilk in the Coronet Instructional Films section of the Internet Archive.) Lots of cool old posters too:



    Happy invoicing!

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