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Monday Links from the Sheriff's Lair vol. CCLXVIII

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    Monday Links from the Sheriff's Lair vol. CCLXVIII

    Posting this from my shiny new iPhone 6
    • Chat Wars - David Auerbach on his involvement in a piece of Internet history: ”In the summer of 1998 I graduated from college and went to work as a programmer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. I was put on the group that was building MSN Messenger Service, Microsoft’s instant messaging app… AOL had the largest user base, so we discussed the possibility of adding code to allow Messenger to log in to two servers simultaneously, Microsoft’s and AOL’s, so that you could see your Messenger and AIM buddies on a single list and talk to AIM buddies via Messenger.” And AOL got rather annoyed at Microsoft’s chat client using their protocol, and so a ridiculous war broke out.

    • Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Original Source Code [1978] - From an earlier period in Microsoft’s history: ”This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs.”

    • The Reason We Celebrate Valentine's Day Has Nothing To Do With Love - "The ancient Greeks had four different forms of love, only one of which is what we'd call romantic. In fact, neither romantic love or its holiday were society's priority until lately. So it should come as no shock that our modern Valentine's Day is an odd creation, rooted and lodged in older, darker, bloodier, and more mercantile endeavors. Here's the tapestry of strange events that somehow turned into today's festival of romance."

    • This Incredible Hospital Robot Is Saving Lives. Also, I Hate It - Matt Simon on the fleets of robots that are carrying out various mundane tasks at the newly-opened University of California Mission Bay Hospital: ”There are no beacons to guide the Tugs. Instead, they use maps in their brains to navigate. They’re communicating with the overall system through the hospital’s Wi-Fi, which also allows them to pick up fire alarms and get out of the way so carbon-based lifeforms can escape. Rolling down the halls using a laser and 27 infrared and ultrasonic sensors to avoid collisions, a Tug will stop well away from the elevators and call one down through the Wi-Fi (to open doors, it uses radio waves).”

    • Mo‘ynaq – Graveyard of Ships in the Desert - Gallery of photos from what was once a fishing port, but is now almost a hundred miles from the Aral Sea: ”The water had been drained off the Aral Sea’s tributaries to support the country’s fast growing cotton industry. The less water there was the easier it was for the sun to evaporate it and the shoreline began to recede – and recede further each year. This shrinkage combined with the chemical runoff from the cotton industry wreaked havoc on the fish in the sea. Yet nothing was done.”

    • Programming with Nothing - Tom stuart gets back to basics: ”Ruby is a powerful language, but how much power does it have if you remove all of its datatypes except for Proc and all of its features except for Proc.new and Proc#call? I’ll investigate by building proc-only representations of numbers, booleans, lists and strings, and using them to write an executable program.”

    • Behold: My Week of Dangerous Self-Indulgence - Julieanne Smolinski enjoys herself: "I'm not a person of modest appetites: I love drinking, overeating, gambling, certain drugs, and having casual sex with horrible people. The only thing that keeps me from doing all of these things at once, and constantly, is a crispy thin-style crust of self-restraint. So when challenged for Journalistic Purposes to spend a week "treating myself" — eating what I wanted, smoking what I wanted, sleeping with whomever, and otherwise indulging myself in hepatically disastrous ways — I wasn't concerned about being able to complete the task. I was concerned that "doing only exactly what I wanted" would be a little too easy."

    • The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money - Whitney Mallett on the Canadian government’s experiment with a guaranteed income for all: ”Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since… the town's poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school.”

    • All’s Fair in Love and Classified Ads: Three Centuries of Public Spouse Shaming - Hilary Sargent looks back at the history of spouses - usually husbands - taking out advertisements disclaiming responsibility for their partners: ”For more than 300 years, newspapers ran advertisements from men publicly announcing their wives had left them, and that they would no longer “be responsible for her debts.”… The first known example, according to Indiana University historian Kirsten Sword, who is writing a book on the history of “wayward wives” ads, was in 1656.”

    • Obvious Plant - Jeff Wysaski puts notices in places, such as bookshops:



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Like the obvious plant site.
    "Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch." - Orson Welles

    Norrahe's blog

    Comment


      #3
      one for apple fanbois

      Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker

      I believe it contains a lot of information about the apple watch implying a launch next week or so...
      merely at clientco for the entertainment

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by norrahe View Post
        Like the obvious plant site.
        dad land! superb.

        Comment

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