Monday Links from the Mad Dash to the Pub vol. CIX

[NickFitz]

Dinner time! Must dash; here's some gubbins:

• Letters to Earth - Don Pettit is blogging from his current mission on the International Space Station: "One time our orbit took us through the center of an auroral display. It was as if we were in a glowing fog of red and green. Had we been shrunk down and inserted into the tube of a neon sign? It looked like it was just on the other side of the windowpane. I wanted to reach out and touch, but of course I couldn’t. Afterwards, I had to clean nose prints off of the window."
  
  
• Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org? - "Back in 2007 I stumbled something called a QR Code... So I did what any self-respecting personal blogger would do: I QR-encoded my own URL. And posted it to my blog... But what happened next defies rationale explanation." The perils of a good Google ranking
  
  
• Sucky Things You'd Rather Not Think About - "Steve Martin used to say 'I learned enough philosophy in college to mess me up for the rest of my life.' There's a bit of truth to that. Philosophy -- the real stuff, not the stuff you learn mostly in college today -- makes you deal with a lot of things you'd rather not." Here's a few of them to brood over in the still, small hours of the night
  
  
• Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? - A question we all know and love; Michael Wolfe has an excellent answer.
  
  
• $1 Billion That Nobody Wants - "Politicians in Washington hardly let a few minutes go by without mentioning how broke the government is. So, it's a little surprising that they've created a stash of more than $1 billion that almost no one wants. Unused dollar coins have been quietly piling up in Federal Reserve vaults in breathtaking numbers, thanks to a government program that has required their production since 2007."
  
  
• Stereogranimator - "Create and share animated GIFs and 3D anaglyphs using more than 40,000 stereographs from The New York Public Library." WTNYLS.
  
  
• I found Ice Cube's 'Good Day' - Excellent use of public data to identify the day some American gentleman was referring to in a rap song
  
  
• Bus-Tops - "Bus-Tops is a collaborative public art installation across 20 London boroughs. There are 30 red and black LED screens dotted around London, on the roofs of bus shelters. Absolutely anyone in the world can create artwork for them, creating a new exhibition space for the public, and Public Art." Get cracking, artists
  
  
• Birds and Words - "In my mind, this set of 1959 Czechoslovakian postage stamps designed by painter, illustrator, lettering artist, teacher and stage designer Karel Svolinsky (1896-1986) and engraved by Jirka Ladislav, are some of the most beautiful I've seen. The illustrations of the birds with the lovely script lettering, and the high quality multi-color engravings, set these Czech stamps apart as works of art." Flushed Left's blog has loads of other beautiful artwork.
  
  
• Formicarius - "Vintage Bizarre and Random Madness" E.g.
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[NickFitz]

Incidentally, CIX used to be short for Compulink Information eXchange; but that didn't really work out, what with one of the letters being in the wrong place and things, so it's gone back to meaning "one hundred and nine"

[TimberWolf]

Incidentally, CIX used to be short for Compulink Information eXchange; but that didn't really work out, what with one of the letters being in the wrong place and things, so it's gone back to meaning "one hundred and nine"

Why use Roman numerals anyway, they are tulip.

[NickFitz]

Why use Roman numerals anyway, they are tulip.

They confer a degree of gravitas

[DS23]

wilf lunn! those were the days...

[TheFaQQer]

They confer a degree of gravitas

For 99, wouldn't IC have been better than XCIX?

And 95 VC rather than XCV?

[NickFitz]

For 99, wouldn't IC have been better than XCIX?

And 95 VC rather than XCV?

Roman numerals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Despite the lack of standardization, an additional set of rules has been frequently applied for the last few hundred years:

• The symbols "I", "X", "C", and "M" can be repeated three times in succession, but no more. (They may appear four times if the third and fourth are separated by a smaller value, such as XXXIX.) "D", "L", and "V" can never be repeated.
• "I" can be subtracted from "V" and "X" only. "X" can be subtracted from "L" and "C" only. "C" can be subtracted from "D" and "M" only. "V", "L", and "D" can never be subtracted
• Only one small-value symbol may be subtracted from any large-value symbol.
• A number written in Arabic numerals can be broken into digits. For example, 1903 is composed of 1, 9, 0, and 3. To write the Roman numeral, each of the non-zero digits should be treated separately. In the above example, 1,000 = M, 900 = CM, and 3 = III. Therefore, 1903 = MCMIII.

Following this additional set of rules, there is only one possible Roman numeral for any given number.