Monday Links from the Fens vol. CCCLV

[NickFitz]

After five months mainly posting the Monday Links from ClientCo, my iPhone has taught itself to autocomplete the title, all but the Roman numerals

• How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind - "There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes… We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump.” David Wong explains the huge cultural divide between urban and rural America that has led to the phenomenon of the short-fingered vulgarian.
  
  
• This Explorer's Corpse Has Been Trapped in Ice for More Than a Century - Scott and his companions may be dead, but they’re still on the move: ”In the century and change since Scott and his comrades died, the cairn-tomb has been slowly moving. That’s because it was erected on top of a 360-foot-thick section of ice—the Ross Ice Shelf, which is constantly fed by glaciers on either side.”
  
  
• The Library of Babel, The Library of Babel, again - Jamie Zawinski: ”I was thinking about the Borges story The Library of Babel and I got to wondering whether anyone had done any decent renderings of it.” Apparently not, and with the help of commenters on his blog he’s working towards creating a 3D model of the strange, repetitive, infinite edifice.
  
  
• The private monorail tunnel under North London - Ian Mansfield reveals yet another kind-of-secret underground transportation system in London: ”Under North London, there exists a private underground monorail service, some 20km long running from Elstree to St John’s Wood in the centre of town.”
  
  
• Two Unexpected Phone Calls - ”They say, when you go to China, there are always stories to tell. Less than 72 hours after I landed in Shanghai, I received an unexpected phone call.” Meiyi Cheng almost got scammed, then somehow managed to get an apology of sorts from one of the scammers
  
  
• A single byte write opened a root execution exploit - ”As one of the maintainers of the c-ares project I’m receiving mails for suspected security problems in c-ares and this was such a one… It turned out that this particular c-ares flaw was one important step in a sequence of necessary procedures that when followed could let the user execute code on ChromeOS from JavaScript – as the root user.” Daniel Sternberg explains the ingenious exploit.
  
  
• Romanian villagers decry police investigation into vampire slaying - "Before Toma Petre's relatives pulled his body from the grave, ripped out his heart, burned it to ashes, mixed it with water and drank it, he hadn't been in the news much. That's often the way here with vampires. Quiet lives, active deaths."
  
  
• The Unlikely Hippies of the USSR - "Flower children, the Summer of Love, and peace signs—the hippie subculture is well known within the United States. But did the counterculture that fueled the idealism of an entire generation make its way elsewhere? The historian William Jay Risch finds hippies in an unlikely place—the Soviet Union of the 1970s." This is a summary of his paper on the subject, which is freely available and linked to from the article.
  
  
• The Virus With Spider DNA - "How did part of a black-widow venom gene end up in a virus that infects one of the world's most successful bacteria?" As if spiders weren’t bad enough, now they’re shipping their DNA around in viruses
  
  
• 1942: Japanese-American 'evacuations' - "Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which granted the Secretary of War the power to designate certain areas of the country as military zones — and the discretion to remove people from those zones as he saw fit… Curfews and asset freezes were imposed on Japanese-Americans, and by May 1942, all people of Japanese ancestry (citizen and non-citizen alike) were being ordered to report to assembly centers for “evacuation” to “relocation centers” — that is, forcible incarceration in concentration camps.” Any relationship to the subject of today’s first link is entirely coincidental…
  
  
  

Bonus perfect-for-chilly-autumn-evenings recipe from norrahe’s blog: Lamb and Chorizo casserole

Happy invoicing!

[WTFH]

Good list!