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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCV

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCV

    I had over a dozen browser windows open at the start of the day, and about half of these were scattered among them. In gathering them together, I've closed roughly fifty tabs of other stuff, and suddenly my browser is running normally again
    • What really killed the Apple III - "The Apple III was a mysterious Apple offering, one that isn't that well known as a system probably due to its short life span. But the 1980 Apple III did represent many firsts for Apple. The III was the first system designed by Apple as a company. It was designed by two key groups, primarily marketing and engineering." A hardware engineer examines a real Apple III to try to determine which of those groups might have been responsible for its failure in the market.

    • The Fold-and-Cut Problem - ”1. Take a piece of paper. 2. Fold it flat. 3. Make one complete straight cut. 4. Unfold the pieces. Are all shapes possible? Refering back to the original sheet of paper, what patterns of cuts can be achieved by this process? The answer turns out to be any pattern of straight cuts." Cool paper-cutting maths! Here’s a video all about the subject:


    • Homeless in Sacramento: A death on the streets - Cynthia Hubert uncovers the life of Genny Lucchesi, who died aged 77 on the streets where she had lived for twenty years: ”He stepped closer, but heard only the sounds of rushing traffic. He pressed Genny’s shoulders. They were limp. He touched her forehead and noted some warmth. But she didn’t open her eyes. “Genny!” he said again, peeling back her sleeping bag and gray blanket… As he watched them load her body into the ambulance, Kelly cried. Not because Genny was sweet, because Lord knows she could be ornery. Not for her family, because as far as he knew she had none. He cried because she could have been his grandmother.”

    • This Photo Tour Of The USAF's "Grim Reapers" F-15 Squadron Will Give You Shivers - Not sure about the shivers, but lots of excellent photos of military hardware and personnel, so that’s cool: ”The Grim Reapers are the only dedicated USAF air superiority squadron forward deployed to Europe and their F-15C/Ds have been very busy since Russia invaded Crimea over a year and a half ago. The Grim Reapers’ roots date back to World War II and they were on the front lines of the Cold War flying various aircraft types.”


    • Executed Today - Every day, somebody who was executed on the same date. Today’s hasn’t been posted yet (timezones, one assumes), but yesterday was the 182nd anniversary of the demise of Ira West Gardner: ”Gardner reads like the kind of rotter to inspire a Lifetime TV obsessed-stalker thriller: in the tiny township of Gustavus, he married a widow named Anna Buel[l] with a teenage daughter… The girl “was seen running from home disordered” and took refuge with a nearby farmer named Mills, where she turned up “barefooted, and without a handkerchief to put on her neck.” This was just two or three days before her murder on August 8, 1832; if the reader is getting a distinct whiff of sexual assault, well, one neighbor “told Gardner, that Maria had said, he had had criminal intercourse with her in a manner that would send him to the penitentiary.” Gardner denied it, but his obsessive behavior tells a different tale.”

    • The Voyage of the S.S. Rhinovirus - Scandinavian author Erik Larson on the perils of being on a cruise ship where everybody else aboard is catching a virulent cold: ”What I did not expect, however, was the extent to which I would have to confront a far more pervasive threat to comfort aboard, which was a cold virus that began Tarzaning from passenger to passenger during the first 48 hours of the voyage, spread in part, I suspect, by a concierge on Deck 9 who looked as if someone had dripped red food-coloring into each of her eyes. Thus began the voyage of the S. S. Rhinovirus.”

    • These Atomic Tourists Have Visited 160 Forgotten Nuclear Sites Across the U.S. - ”Timothy Karpin and James Maroncelli… have visited some 160 sites across the nation that had some role in atomic history. Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee are the most well-known Manhattan Project weapons development sites. They’re the trio that will eventually become the Manhattan Project National Park. But, as Maroncelli and Karpin discovered after some historical sleuthing, they’re far from the only nuclear weapons development sites.”

    • The Bizarre North Korean Axe Murders - The strange 1976 incident when North Korean soldiers murdered two US Army officers for chopping down a tree in the DMZ, which almost led to war: ”Three days later, the U.S. and South Korea launched Operation Paul Bunyan, to cut down the tree with a show of force. These teams were accompanied by two 30-man security platoons from the Joint Security Force, who were armed with pistols and axe handles. North Korea quickly responded with about 150–200 heavily armed troops. The Yokota Air Force Base in Japan was on full alert. The North Koreans quickly disembarked from their buses and began setting up two-man machine gun positions, where they watched in silence as the tree was felled in 42 minutes. Further confrontation was avoided.”

    • I Toured Stasi HQ with NSA Whistleblowers - ”The Stasi offices in Berlin have been frozen in time since they were stormed by activists on January 15th, 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall three months earlier… the specter of Big Brother lingers, as I'm reminded by the man who is accompanying me through the exhibits: William Binney, the former NSA technical director who helped design mass surveillance systems for the agency, before spending a decade warning the world about the risks of those systems.”

    • Beer Labels in Motion - When Trevor Carmick finds a beer he likes, he animates the label:



    Bonus foody link: norrahe’s award winning Kitchen Exile: Guinea fowl methi masala with Pilau rice and chapatis

    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Love the beer one.
    Originally posted by MaryPoppins
    I'd still not breastfeed a nazi
    Originally posted by vetran
    Urine is quite nourishing

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