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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCVII

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCVII

    Discovered this morning that I only had enough coffee beans left for two cups. Got to dash to the shops now
    • Texting With Cancer - Natalie Sun: ”On July 31st, 2015 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Good news: I’m going to be fine. Bad news: It’s going to suck. Probably. Texting with Cancer is the mental conversation with optimism and pessimism as I deal with cancer and life. Pink = Me, Grey = Pessimism, White = Optimism.”

    • Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks - James Somers finds out why the antiquated infrastructure of the NYC subway takes so long to improve: ”The only people who know exactly where that train is are on the train itself. The signal-tower operators don’t know; there’s no one in the Rail Control Center who could tell you… Trains are huge objects that move in one dimension. How could it cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take nearly a decade just to figure out where they are and report that information to the public? Really: How?”

    • Edward Snowden Explains How To Reclaim Your Privacy - Handy hints from someone who knows about these things: ”Our first meeting would be in the hotel lobby, and I arrived with all my important electronic gear in tow. I had powered down my smartphone and placed it in a “faraday bag” designed to block all radio emissions. This, in turn, was tucked inside my backpack next to my laptop (which I configured and hardened specifically for traveling to Russia), also powered off… A bearded man wearing glasses and a trench coat stood a few feet from me, apparently doing nothing aside from staring at a stained-glass window. Later he shifted from one side of my couch to the other, walking away just after I made eye contact.”

    • A Dead Disease Still Lives in Lab Freezers. What Else Does? - "In the summer of 1977, an influenza epidemic began to spread through China; by fall, it was in Russia, and over the winter, it spread across the Northern Hemisphere… world health authorities eventually concluded that the 1977 eruption was not a natural event. The only way a flu strain so like an extinct one could have reappeared, they said, was for it to be the extinct one—preserved in some lab’s freezer, and released in some accident that has never been acknowledged.” Maryn McKenna on the potential pandemics stored in labs around the world.

    • Cleaning Vinyl LP's - Smearing glue all over your precious vinyl sounds like a crazy idea, but it actually works: ”When it was all done, I was pleasantly surprised. The difference was like night and day. The previously-recorded WAV file from the LP looked "fuzzy" with a lot of noise. The new WAV file was clean. It had almost no clicks or pops. Alright, it still had a few, but it was nowhere near as bad.” Here’s a YouTube video demonstrating the process:


    • The Unlikely Struggle Of The Family Whose Neighbor Is Area 51 - "Plenty of landowners have fought the government over plans to seize their property. But the Sheahan family of Nevada have not spent decades defending some mundane corner of farmland from being covered by a proposed interstate… It is a place where the family claims they were strafed by machine gun fire. Where cancer and burns came as a likely result of nuclear detonations mere miles away. Where they have faced invasive, terrifying security measures from men in uniform.”

    • The Cop at the End of the World - "The longest serving officer at Australia’s most remote police outpost, Neale McShane is about to retire. But first, one last big weekend watching Birdsville, population 80, become an unlikely — and ill-suited — tourist destination."

    • Living and Dying on Airbnb - Zak Stone’s father was killed in an accident at an Airbnb property. He looks at the dangers that arise from the new trend for startups to act as mere brokers for unregulated individuals: ”While “Airbnb’ing a room” has become the norm for many travelers, the company denies it has anything to do with lodging. Rather, it’s “a trusted community marketplace” and “an online platform that connects hosts who have accommodations to rent with guests seeking to rent such accommodations”… Companies that take advantage of such ambiguity pose risks to consumers, particularly when they’re trafficking in human experience, not just data or speech like Napster, Tumblr, and others before them who have appealed to their platform status to weather challenges to the legally murky activities they host.”

    • Modern Homelessness: Privatisation, Policing and Public Toilets - "It’s 3am, and having put my life into a rucksack weeks ago, I’m plodding homelessly across London without a place to crash. Pints of coffee are catching up with me… There are toilets, I realise, back at Charing Cross, but because I hate u-turns more than being illogical, I decide I’m bound to bump into some. I know I’ll regret it even as I make up my mind, and sure enough, by 4.30, my kidneys are in full revolt.” Alex Gabriel on the petty difficulties of life when you have nowhere to go.

    • The Beat Artist Who Rescued Paper Planes from the Streets of NYC - "Prolific 20th-century polymath Harry Smith, who’s best known for his experimental filmmaking but also dabbled in painting, anthropology, music, and the occult, picked up every paper airplane he saw on the streets of Manhattan from 1961 to 1983. Only 251 survive from the Beat artist’s collection." And now there’s a book of photographs of them by Jason Fulford



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Originally posted by zeitghost
    Haven't we done the Oz cop previously?
    Don't think so - that piece was published a week ago last Friday, and he wasn't in last week. I don't remember him from before that, and https://www.google.co.uk/?q=site:for...s%22+australia doesn't show any likely candidates

    Though it's bound to happen one day. A year or so ago I almost posted something about the Milgram experiment, then realised I'd posted it a couple of years before - it had just been republished on a different site

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by zeitghost
      And what a remarkably dumb way to die.

      Sad, but the story is about who to sue, how to make money (by all concerned), and the fact that the web broker model is a way to get something cheap without wondering how it can be so cheap, then complaining afterwards.
      …Maybe we ain’t that young anymore

      Comment


        #4
        Found this linked off the New York Subway article.

        Very long but an interesting read:
        What ISIS Really Wants - The Atlantic

        Which prompted me to read this:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_Islam

        (yes, it's a slow day here so swatting up on ISIS seemed a reasonable use of my reassuringly expensive time. I'm sure Client Co won't mind).

        Comment

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