• Visitors can check out the Forum FAQ by clicking this link. You have to register before you can post: click the REGISTER link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. View our Forum Privacy Policy.
  • Want to receive the latest contracting news and advice straight to your inbox? Sign up to the ContractorUK newsletter here. Every sign up will also be entered into a draw to WIN £100 Amazon vouchers!

Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXCIX

Collapse
X
  •  
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXCIX

    Very grey day today, but the Internet has pretty colours you can look at instead
    • We’ve been predicting eclipses for over 2000 years. Here’s how. and Eclipses Make Great Yardsticks - No total eclipse for us today, but as we’ll get a few minutes of partial eclipse hidden behind the clouds just before sunset, here’s a couple of articles about the history of eclipse-related science

    • Stalking Horse - "Inside a rookie FBI agent’s quest to take down a brutal drug cartel’s American horse-racing empire." Extract from a new book by Melissa del Bosque on a drug cartel laundering money through horse racing.

    • The Madam Who Turned to Stone - "Did Mother Damnable—aka Mary Ann Boyer, Seattle's original hard-ass—really turn to stone after her death in 1873?" Probably not, but she sounds like an interesting character, to say the least.

    • The Fallout From Sportswriting's Filthiest ****-Up - The unfortunate chain of events that transpired when a junior reporter inserted a crude joke in a story, assuming the subeditor would take it out… and the sub didn’t spot it. ”The alliterative beauty of ‘Dixon sucks donkey dicks’ is undeniable… Dottie recalls that shortly after publication, she bumped into a police officer who asked to meet her son. ‘I wanna shake your hand,’ he said to Nick. ‘That was the best writing to ever appear in that paper.’”

    • The lives of bitcoin miners digging for digital gold in Inner Mongolia - "A decade ago, after a speculative coal boom fizzled, the once-thriving desert city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, became China’s largest ghost town, littered with unfinished or empty buildings and desperate for another way to make money… Today, Ordos (population 2 million) has emerged as a center of bitcoin mining, the process of approving transactions and creating new coins in the digital currency’s system.”

    • How The Great 78 Project is saving half a million songs from obscurity - The Internet Archive has turned its attention to 78rpm records: ”’We’re currently delivering 5-6,000 sides per month,’ says George Blood, president of the audio-visual digitisation company that bears his name, ‘and we’ll be working to get to 20,000.’ The goal, Blood says, is to create a ‘reference collection of sound recordings from the period of approximately 1880 to 1960.’” The constantly-growing archive is at https://archive.org/details/78rpm

    • Can Humans Understand Chimps? - Not if some of the replies I get on here are anything to go by ”Cat Hobaiter and Kirsty Graham from the University of St. Andrews… and their team, led by the primatologist Richard Byrne, have spent years painstakingly cataloging the gestures of chimps and other apes, filming them in the wild and poring over the recordings to work out how each movement is used. And now, they want to know what people see in the footage.”

    • Impossibly hungry judges - Statistician Daniel Lakens on the cautionary tale of an oft-quoted statistic that simply makes no sense: ”Robert Sapolsky mentioned a famous study on judges handing out harsher sentences before lunch than after lunch… I think we should dismiss this finding, simply because it is impossible. When we interpret how impossibly large the effect size is, anyone with even a modest understanding of psychology should be able to conclude that it is impossible that this data pattern is caused by a psychological mechanism.”

    • Public Enemy - Martin Shkreli, who gained notoriety for massively increasing the prices of various medicines, is on trial for securities and wire fraud in New York. These are actual transcripts from the jury selection process: ”THE COURT: The question is, have you heard anything that would affect your ability to decide this case with an open mind. Can you do that? JUROR NO. 144: I don’t think I can because he kind of looks like a dick. THE COURT: You are Juror Number 144 and we will excuse you.”

    • Abandoned Theme Parks - A tumblr dedicated to… well, see if you can guess.



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    [*]Abandoned Theme Parks - A tumblr dedicated to… well, see if you can guess.

    Looks like Suity tried to build Stromberg's lair from The Spy Who Loved Me

    Comment

    Working...
    X