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Monday Links from the Barnyard vol. CCXVIII

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    Monday Links from the Barnyard vol. CCXVIII

    Nice and sunny out here in the country today. The small wind turbine in the next field is turning in a very lazy fashion as it basks
    • One-Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society - "I met Ross at an event that might single-handedly explain why the rest of the country still hates financial tycoons – the annual black-tie induction ceremony of a secret Wall Street fraternity called Kappa Beta Phi... Each year, the group’s dinner features comedy skits, musical acts in drag, and off-color jokes, and its group’s privacy mantra is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.” For eight decades, it worked. No outsider in living memory had witnessed the entire proceedings firsthand." These ******* took all our money

    • Torus–Earth - "One question at Io9 that came up when they published my Double Earth analysis was "What about a toroidal Earth?" This is by no means a new question, and there has been some lengthy discussions online and earlier modelling. But being a do-it-yourself person I decided to try to analyze it on my own." Anders Sandberg examines the possibility of a doughnut-shaped planet. Among many other options: could there be a moon in a stable orbit that goes through the hole?

    • Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple: A Mini Course from Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Hans Bethe - "A nuclear physicist, Bethe made key contributions to the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war, he brought stellar young physicists like Richard Feynman from Los Alamos to Ithaca and turned Cornell’s physics department into a top-notch program... As a tribute to Bethe, Cornell now hosts a web site called Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple, where you can watch three lectures presented by Bethe in 1999. They’re a little different from the usual lectures you encounter online." There'll be a test at the end.

    • Meet the seven people who hold the keys to worldwide internet security - James Ball was invited to attend the regular updating of the crypto keys that secure DNS, and thus the Internet: "It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. The reality is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix."

    • Warner Bros. Logo Design Evolution - "All studios have their main logo that appears at the beginning of a film, but some occasionally use custom logos that reflect the theme of the movie. When I noticed that Warner Bros. does this a lot I wanted to find out how often this happened and what these logos looked like. I couldn’t find a good overview with all logos gathered in one place, so I started to collect them myself, in 2009. Now, five years later, I think I have enough to paint a picture of Warner Bros logo design evolution." I've linked to the Movie Title Stills Collection before (three years ago last December; you remember) but this exhaustive look through the Warner logo's history is worth a special visit.

    • The 6502 CPU's overflow flag explained at the silicon level - Ken Shirriff explains how just one flag of an 8-bit processor works, with reference to the actual silicon: "I've discussed the mathematics of the 6502 overflow flag earlier and thought it would be interesting to look at the actual chip-level implementation. Even though the overflow flag is a slightly obscure feature, its circuit is simple enough that it can be explained at the silicon level."

    • Castle Bravo revisited - "No single nuclear weapons test did more to establish the grim realities of the thermonuclear age than Castle BRAVO. On March 1, 1954, it was the highest yield test in the United States’ highest-yield nuclear test series, exploding with a force of 15 million tons of TNT. It was also the greatest single radiological disaster in American history." Boomed, indeed

    • Atomic Rockets - from nuclear weapons to nuclear-powered spaceships: "This document gives some hints and equations that will allow back-of-the-envelope calculations on such matters. Though horribly simplistic, they are far better than just making up your figures." HT to Alias for pointing me in the direction of this one

    • SkyJack - "SkyJack is a drone engineered to autonomously seek out, hack, and wirelessly take full control over any other drones within wireless or flying distance, creating an army of zombie drones under your control." Includes videos, and explanations of how to make your own pirate drone from a commercially available drone, or even use a Raspberry Pi from the ground to seize control of any drones in your vicinity.

    • Little Lost Things - little lost things in New York holding little signs about being lost:



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Re Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple; once saw an explanation of relativity in terms of a people walking round the edge of a rectangle. Made sense at the time. Still not quite as simple as 42 obviously.

    Lost. As I go walking so much I'm always finding stuff, found a brand new lighter on Saturday. And a Smurf the other week.
    Last edited by xoggoth; 3 March 2014, 13:22.
    bloggoth

    If everything isn't black and white, I say, 'Why the hell not?'
    John Wayne (My guru, not to be confused with my beloved prophet Jeremy Clarkson)

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by zeitghost
      Bugger. The sliderule Apollo 11 img thingie doesn't work:

      Fixed it:



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