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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXVIII

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXVIII

    I got a new mattress on Saturday, so while you get on with reading this lot, I'm going to lie down again and marvel at how comfortable it is
    • In Search of Whales - "Far out in the Pacific Ocean, my dream to dive with the magnificent humpback whales comes true. Yet while we are out there, a darker side of the ocean is revealed. It is one that makes life seem all the more precious and full of beauty." Amazing photos, and story, by Anuar Patjane.

    • The Neurologist Who Hacked His Brain — And Almost Lost His Mind - "The brain surgery lasted 11 and a half hours, beginning on the afternoon of June 21, 2014, and stretching into the Caribbean predawn of the next day… Kennedy attempted to respond. It looked as if he was trying to force his brain to work, like someone with a sore throat who bears down to swallow. Meanwhile, the surgeon’s mind kept circling back to the same uneasy thought: ‘I shouldn’t have done this.’” Turns out hiring a neurosurgeon to implant stuff in your brain may not be a good idea. Who knew?

    • Project: Redrawing the London Tube Map - "I believe that the map — in its current format — is ill-equipped to handle future additions… A number of designers have proposed alternative London rail maps that deal with this problem… but I started to wonder: what if the Tube Map was just drawn better?” Cameron Booth tidies up the map

    • CERN Engineers Have to Identify and Disconnect 9,000 Obsolete Cables - Tidying up complex network diagrams is one thing; but in Switzerland: ”In the past, when parts of the accelerators have been upgraded or added to, engineers would often additionally replace the cables that connected them. In the process, they would leave in place the old cables that were no longer in use. Now, a heap of obsolete cables are blocking the way to install new ones needed for the accelerator’s next big upgrade. To make space, CERN engineers have set out to identify and remove the old, unused cables. All 9,000 of them.”

    • Trench warfare: London's treasure hunt riots - Paul Slade on a frenzy of newspaper-inspired digging, many years before Kit Williams’ Masquerade:”Thomas Wright, a West London barrister, came home from his Lincoln's Inn chambers one evening in January 1904 to find a mob of treasure hunters wrecking his front garden. One of them had already dug down to the base of the garden railings and was busy trying to dislodge them to see if a £50 medallion had been buried beneath. Glancing up and down Westbourne Terrace, Wright could see that many of his neighbours' gardens had been invaded too. This had been going on for four days.”

    • The Best Teacher I Never Had - Bill Gates on Richard Feynman: ”Feynman had this amazing knack for making physics clear and fun at the same time. I immediately went looking for more of his talks, and I’ve been a big fan ever since. Years later I bought the rights to those lectures and worked with Microsoft to get them posted online for free.” (If, like me, you don’t have Silverlight installed to view the lectures, you can find them with a search on YouTube.)

    • This smart bag can charge phones, weigh itself… and nearly got me kicked off a flight - It turns out that travelling with luggage that comes complete with a hidden compartment that blocks X-rays and has wires trailing from it might be considered suspicious: ”At this point a second officer shows up to give me the inevitable pat down, and she starts looking through my luggage. They swab it as part of an Explosives Trace Detection test and the bag alarms… I explained the concept of the bag and tried to show them the booklet that came with the luggage. The second officer warns me not to touch the bag while she’s inspecting.”

    • How To Drive In The Snow, In A Regular-Ass Car, Without Freaking Out - Helpful advice:”The first thing you need to know in order to drive the hell home in the snow: You are not actually required to lose your goddamn mind just because snow is falling. It is not the apocalypse. Neither physics nor society have been cancelled by it. It is not sulfuric ash. There are no abominable snowpeople stalking through it. It will not dissolve your body if it touches you. It is frozen water.”

    • The Facebook-Loving Farmers of Myanmar - "For six weeks last October and November, just before Myanmar held its landmark elections, I joined a team of design ethnographers in the countryside interviewing forty farmers about smartphones. A design ethnographer is someone who studies how culture and technology interact. A common mistake in building products is to base them on assumptions around how a technology might be adopted. The goal of in-field interviewing in design ethnography is to undermine these assumptions, to be able to design tools and products aligned with actual observed use cases and needs." Send this link to any web designer you know who prates about “mobile first” while including several megabytes of JavaScript in a site for the sake of animating some irrelevant crap in the sidebar.

    • Spivs and the Post-War British Gangster Films - "In January 1948 the Observer film critic, C.A. Lejeune, made no attempt to hide her disapproving tone when reviewing the Boulting Brothers’ ‘Brighton Rock’… Reg Whitley in the Daily Mirror joined in with the disapproval but his distaste was not just with Brighton Rock but with the whole of the growing genre of British crime thrillers. Under the headline ‘WHY STAR THE SPIVS’ he wrote “We are in for a real basinful of British pictures about spivs, smash-and-grab raids and West End “wide boys,” with a bunch of grim murder dramas thrown in as light relief”.” Or, as we now call them, classic British films with characters of dubious morals ranging from Richard Attenborough’s Pinky, to Dodgy Agent George Cole’s Flash Harry



    Bonus seasonal soup recipe from norrahe, because soup: Smoked Ham Hock and pea soup

    Happy invoicing!

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