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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXII

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXII

    Happy Winter Solstice for tomorrow, everybody! Oh, and apparently the Christians are having some kind of do later in the week as well
    • I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You - Lindy West is unimpressed by the Christmas rom-com: ”We open in a ******* airport. A ******* AIRPORT!!! Of course Love Actually, the apex of cynically vacant faux-emotional cash-grab garbage cinema would hang its BIG METAPHOR on the bleak, empathy-stripped cathedral of turgid bureaucracy known as "the airport." Of course. And then, of course, Hugh Grant's voice pipes in to tell us how inspiring and magical the airport is, because when you're at the airport you can't help but notice that "love actually IS all around." THE ******* AIRPORT!!!!!” I’ve never seen the film, but Lindy’s righteous fury at its vapidity makes me want to watch it just to see if it’s really that bad

    • The DNA of a London Underground Station - "On 1st December 2015 Transport for London (TfL) unveiled its new design bible, the Design Idiom. Though the name may sound grandiose, the goal is simple: create a document that captures the design aesthetic of the Underground, so that good design can help drive decision-making at London Underground." Excellent overview by Nicole Badstuber; you can also have a look at the document itself (PDF).

    • Mathematical gift wrapping - Handy guide to applying some simple maths to make effective use of wrapping paper, by Katie Steckles


    • Peek Inside the Grisly, Salacious Case Files of NYC's Head Coroner in the Early 1900s - Some interesting cases from the files of Dr. Gustav Scholer: ”Dr. Scholer’s annual report to the mayor in 1902 recorded that there were 5,846 new cases… The causes of the deaths Scholer investigated included "illuminating gas, both accidental and suicide, opium poisonings, deaths from cutting throat, setting fire to clothing, overdoses of morphia and laudanum, pistol shots, stabbings, and deaths following illicit abortions." His investigations took him from the tenements of the Lower East Side to the glittering world of the upper classes.”

    • 10 Classic Victorian Ghost Stories Everyone Should Read - No need to limit yourself to A Christmas Carol for scaring everybody: ”The Victorians loved a ghost story, and many of the most celebrated writers of Victorian novels had a go at this ghoulish genre, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Charles Dickens to Robert Louis Stevenson. Here are ten of our favourites.”

    • Parasite of the Day - If you prefer your horror stories to be about things living on other things, there’s a huge collection of them here, such as Enterobius vermicularis: ”Got kids? Then, perhaps you also have Enterobius vermicularis, pinworms. These are oxyurid nematodes and one of the most prevalent diseases of children in the developed world.”

    • The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong) - Turns out all the explanations popularly given for the famous collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge are wrong: ”Understanding Gertie would prove trickier than the [New York] Times suggested. So tricky, that four decades after the central questions were answered—by Farquharson and his successors—the common explanation taught in physics classrooms, resonance, is inaccurate. So tricky that it was only recently that anyone seemed to notice that some of the eerie, unforgettable footage of the collapse, shown by generations of physics teachers, is also misleading.”


    • An Unbelievable Story of Rape - "She had reported being raped in her apartment by a man who had bound and gagged her. Then, confronted by police with inconsistencies in her story, she had conceded it might have been a dream. Then she admitted making the story up. One TV newscast announced, “A Western Washington woman has confessed that she cried wolf when it came to her rape she reported earlier this week.” She had been charged with filing a false report, which is why she was here today, to accept or turn down a plea deal." But her rape was real, the police ignored the evidence and bullied her into signing a retraction, then prosecuted her for lying; and meanwhile, the man responsible was left free to commit further rapes.

    • Death by Christmas dinner - "If you haven’t yet bought everything for your Christmas dinner, this tale from almost 200 years ago may cause you to remove a few items from your shopping list. Published in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions in 1814 by Thomas Chevalier, a distinguished surgeon… it concerns a teenage boy who purportedly ate himself to death on Christmas Day." There are loads more interesting (read: repulsive) medical stories on Thomas Morris’s blog, which has the tagline “Making you grateful for modern medicine”

    • Christmas Drawing Book (1986) - If you fancy drawing your own Christmas-related things such as a robot sheep, this book will show you how.



    Happy invoicing!
    Last edited by NickFitz; 21 December 2015, 15:55. Reason: Tyop :)

    #2
    Christmas with the Coopers makes Love Actually look like a Shakespearian period piece.

    And I remember Mr C (a chartered Mechanical Stress Engineer), explaining to me why the general explanations for Gertie collapsing were wrong. I'll have to show him the article.
    "I can put any old tat in my sig, put quotes around it and attribute to someone of whom I've heard, to make it sound true."
    - Voltaire/Benjamin Franklin/Anne Frank...

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
      Mathematical gift wrapping - Handy guide to applying some simple maths to make effective use of wrapping paper, by Katie Steckles
      If only I have seen that before appearing on the ITV news wrapping presents.

      Comment

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