Monday Links from the Barnyard vol. CCX

[NickFitz]

First Monday back at ClientCo, but a permie isn't back yet who needs to set up some stuff for my new project, so I may get to go home after lunch

• Synopsis of the Alien Master Plan - "This article addresses some important questions regarding the alien agenda... Mankind is being enslaved by non-human forces who are technologically, psychically, and dimensionally superior to us. They consist of multiple factions, spanning multiple dimensions and locations in spacetime, all here to take a slice of the human pie. Their ultimate goal is to assimilate us into their fascist empire and parasitically exploit us for our biological, etheric, and physical resources." Careful, Zeity, they're on to you
  
  
• Open Domesday - "The Domesday Book statistics underlying this site were originally collected during the 1990s to create the Domesday Explorer CD-ROM. The data was created by a team led by Professor John Palmer at the University of Hull, funded by the AHRC, and assisted by a Domesday Book translation provided by the publishers Phillimore & Co. Anna found the data online, and used it to make this site." Free online version of the Domesday Book by Anna Powell-Smith, allowing you to search by modern place name, and so forth. The dataset she used is also available (link from the "About" page), and there's an HTTP API you can use.
  
  
• The Year We Broke The Internet - Luke O'Neil explains how the desperate search for page views has broken online journalism: "That’s the secret that Upworthy, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, Viral Nova, and their dozens of knockoffs have figured out: You don’t need to write anymore—just write a good headline and point. If what you’re pointing at turns out to be a steaming turd, well, then repackage the steam and sell it back to us."
  
  
• Don’t Start a Company, Kid - Aaron Hillegass on the lure of startups: "This post is about why starting a company is just dumb. And I know: I started a successful company."
  
  
• Wow this is Doge - "When 51-year-old Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato started seeing strange pictures of her eight-year-old Shiba Inu dog Kabosu popping up on the internet this past August, she was a little freaked out." Hardly surprising. Good article about the owners of dogs that have had their pictures hijacked by the doge meme, in which a dog's supposed stream of consciousness floats around it in multicoloured Comic Sans and... Oh hell, it's impossible to explain, but it looks like this:
  
  
  
  
  
• PHP Manual Masterpieces - Melissa Elliott, aka 0xabad1dea "(the zero-x is silent)" plumbs the hideous depths of the PHP Manual, particularly the user-contributed comments that supposedly illustrate useful techniques, and brings back exotica demonstrating just how weird the language, its libraries, and its users can be: "From an oooold comment of the 2005 vintage: 'In my much of my coding I have found it necessary to type-cast between objects of different class types'… {code omitted}… This person is serializing an arbitrary class, using regex to replace the serialized class name and its length, and unserializing to coerce PHP into some ghastly faux “typecast” of two different classes. I don’t even want to know what can go wrong here, because it can’t be pretty. I want to slam the lid shut on this idea and lose the key down a hell pit... Just kidding, let’s go Pandora on this box of badness."
  
  
• The survival time of chocolates on hospital wards: covert observational study - Paper in the British Medical Journal: "Observers covertly placed two 350 g boxes of Quality Street and Roses chocolates on each ward (eight boxes were used in the study containing a total of 258 individual chocolates). These boxes were kept under continuous covert surveillance, with the time recorded when each chocolate was eaten... Chocolate survival in a hospital ward was relatively short, and was modelled well by an exponential decay model. Roses chocolates were preferentially consumed to Quality Street chocolates in a ward setting. Chocolates were consumed primarily by healthcare assistants and nurses, followed by doctors. Further practical studies are needed."
  
  
• Daily Telegraph World War One Archive - "Every day from now until the end of 2018 we will be republishing in PDF form the full original edition of The Daily Telegraph of 100 years ago. The archive will grow into a fascinating record of how the First World War was reported, but the accounts of life on the home front - and of a world that was vanishing - are just as gripping."
  
  
• Largest small system emulator - PC emulator submitted by Adrian Cable to the International Obfuscated C Code Contest: "This entry weighs in at a magical 4043 bytes (8086 nibbles, 28,301 bits). It manages to implement most of the hardware in a 1980’s era IBM-PC using a few hundred fewer bits than the total number of transistors used to implement the original 8086 CPU."
  
  
• Source Code in TV and Films - Excellent new Tumblr collects "Images of the computer code appearing in TV and films and what they really are." For example: "In the TV series Arrow some C source code is shown for calculating the position of Jupiter’s Galilean moons."
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[OwlHoot]

[*]Open Domesday - "The Domesday Book statistics underlying this site were originally collected during the 1990s to create the Domesday Explorer CD-ROM. The data was created by a team led by Professor John Palmer at the University of Hull, funded by the AHRC, and assisted by a Domesday Book translation provided by the publishers Phillimore & Co. Anna found the data online, and used it to make this site." Free online version of the Domesday Book by Anna Powell-Smith, allowing you to search by modern place name, and so forth. The dataset she used is also available (link from the "About" page), and there's an HTTP API you can use.

Nobody knows who organised the Domesday survey, or who wrote the books (little and great Domesday), which are all in the same handwriting. But I reckon it was probably a guy called Regenbald, although he'd have been cogging on a bit by the 1080s and they didn't have spectacles in those days.

[DS23]

chocolate survival conclusions: "Given the short half life of a box of chocolates, to ensure that all healthcare staff get benefits from consistent chocolate consumption it is the authors’ opinion that the frequency of chocolates delivered to wards needs to be increased and a concerted lobbying response instigated against recent manufacturers’ trends in shrinking the size of chocolate boxes."