Monday Links from the Roseate Dawn of 2013 vol. CLVIII

[NickFitz]

And here we go, with the fourth year of Monday Links - not bad, considering I might not have made it to the end of the first

• Amnesia and the Self That Remains When Memory Is Lost - "Although retrograde amnesia is real, it's usually the result of a tumor, stroke, or other organic brain trauma. It isn't restored by a knock on the head. Because they can still form new memories, patients with retrograde amnesia are acutely aware that they have a cognitive deficit, are painfully knowledgeable about what they are losing." Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin on his acquaintance Tom, who lost his memories to a brain tumour.
  
  
• Doing gravity right - "…there's a big flaw in the commonly used Euler's method to handle the gravity (or other forces). Even all the Quake games have this problem. Then what is it? If you have more frames per second in Quake, your player will run faster and jump higher. There are some places in Quake where you can't jump high enough if you don't have enough frames per second. Sounds odd, right?" Hannu Kankaanpää explains how to avoid the same mistake.
  
  
• Night-Shifting For the Hip Fleet - "It has been a year since I drove a cab, but the old garage still looks the same. The generator is still clanging in the corner. The crashed cars are still in the shop. The weirdos are still sweeping the cigarette butts of the cement floor. The friendly old “YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE for all front-end accidents” is as comforting as ever." Writer Mark Jacobson worked as a New York cabbie while trying to make it as a journalist in the Seventies. This piece describing his experiences is like a dystopic version of the sitcom Taxi.
  
  
• The art of divorce: She gets the Monet, he gets the Renoir - What happens to the art collection when a Microsoft millionaire and his wife split up? In this case, the judge made them explain what the paintings meant to them: "Calhoun wrote seven pages, going through the pieces one by one. At times she described her emotional reaction to the art… He said he needed artwork to secure a line of credit with JPMorgan Chase."
  
  
• Gode Cookery - "Gode Cookery is an award-winning medieval history website dedicated to the food & feasts of the Middle Ages & Renaissance. Here you will find information on medieval cooking, instructions for preparing authentic feasts, hundreds of recipes, image collections, a medieval cooking discussion group, graphics, photographs, and history resources." Time to get that "Cockentrice, made by stitching together a suckling pig and a capon" in the oven
  
  
• Secret and Lies of the Bailout - "The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come." Bankers and politicians scheming together to screw the rest of us? Shocking!
  
  
• Crazy Japanese Kit Kat Flavors - "Japan is known the world over for it’s eclectic palette. They eat whale, horse, raw eggs and chicken without a second thought. So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they take some creative license with snacks as well. In this case the Kit Kat." Wasabi is the least of it
  
  
• Inside the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation - "In a Cold War bunker in the foothills of Blue Ridge Mountains, archivists are gathering every movie, every TV program, every album they can get their hands on. Is it all worth saving? And what will it tell future generations about us?"
  
  
• The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race - Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel) explains why agriculture maybe wasn't such a good idea after all: "…the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, 'Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?'"
  
  
• Things Riding on Things - A handy matrix allows you to choose the thing you want to see riding and what you want to see it riding on. I like this turtle riding on a jellyfish:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[Alias]

I always liked to rocket jump in Quake for hard to reach places :

strafe jumping was a norm for getting around a map quicker tho

[NickFitz]

Another eggsellent selection.

Re that Packard archive thingie: just imagine how much of today's stuff will be machine readable in a century.

As they say, at least film stock gives you a visible image.

Not many paper tape readers or punched card readers about these days.

It'll all end in tears I tell ye.

At least with punched tape or cards you can scan them and read them via image processing.

Chap on Twitter over the weekend was asking who's currently best in the field of scanning vinyl records. Turns out it's possible to do a 3D scan with a laser, and extract the sound from that

[northernladuk]

We have some Wasabi kits kats at the end of one of the tables as we speak. Have to say they are great!!! There will be ContractorJP with a post on it about peanut butter kit kats I am sure... I liked them as well.

[northernladuk]

Things Riding on Things - A handy matrix allows you to choose the thing you want to see riding and what you want to see it riding on. I like this turtle riding on a jellyfish:

LOL this is brilliant! Google should include this type of indexing in their picture search. Hope it goes wiki so we can all edit it.

[Sysman]

Yup.

Someone did that from a photograph of a record.

I forget quite why.

I think it was from the mysts of tyme or somesuch.

At least a decade ago someone got some data out of a system by playing it through a loudspeaker and then interpreting the beeps and buzzes.

Impressive from a lateral thinking angle, if somewhat slow in execution.