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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDXXIX

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDXXIX

    If it's as cold there as it is here, you'll be better off staying in and feeding your head with this lot rather than venturing out for lunch
    • A Cultural Leap at the Dawn of Humanity - "New finds from Kenya suggest that humans used long-distance trade networks, sophisticated tools, and symbolic pigments right from the dawn of our species." Ed Yong on recent discoveries suggesting Ugg and Thog weren't as primitive as we tend to think.

    • The Women Who Lived at CIA - An odd little story of Langley: "A quarter mile from CIA’s Headquarters building, within the confines of CIA property, sits a four story Georgian Revival house at 6200 Georgetown Pike. The house is the oldest standing structure on CIA grounds. Built in 1926, the house was occupied by Margaret Scattergood and Florence Thorne for 53 years… Neither Margaret nor Florence could have ever predicted that within 30 years of purchase, their home would be enclosed on CIA property, behind its protective barriers, while hundreds of CIA officers came to work just a stones’ throw away."

    • Stairway to Nowhere - Geoff Manaugh: "The Estonian Academy of Arts continues to produce interesting site-specific installations in the nation’s remote and often extraordinary landscapes, the most-recent example being an observation tower and staircase built amidst the sprawling Tuhu bog."


    • What Have We Learned from the PDP-11? - Dave Cheney revisits a 1976 paper by Gordon Bell of DEC on the lessons of the classic minicomputer for computer architecture design: "Because of the open nature of the PDP-11, anything which interpreted the instructions according to the processor specification, was a PDP-11, so there had been a rush within DEC, once it was clear that the PDP-11 market was heating up, to build implementations; you had different groups building fast, expensive ones and cost reduced slower ones… was the PDP-11 a great design, or was it simply the beneficiary of a hyperactive marketing department? To answer his own question Bell begins to reflect on the product that emerged and evaluate it against the design criteria that he and his fellow authors identified six years earlier."

    • To Catch a Predator - "The NYPD’s top sex-crimes investigator tried to bust Harvey Weinstein three years ago. Then the DA stepped in." Kathy Dobie on Michael Osgood, the commander of the NYPD’s Special Victims Division, and the way the rich and powerful are protected by the NY establishment.

    • This Is What The Northern Lights Look Like From Inside a U-2 “Dragon Lady” Spyplane - "Although we don’t know anything about the purpose of the mission, we know that [Ross Franquemont] saw the Northern Lights: indeed, the amazing images you can find in this post were taken by Ross during his mission from the UK." His selfies are better than your selfies:


    • Spirograph effect in HTML canvas - Fun little thing from John Burn Murdoch: "Created based on the parametric equations set out in the Wikipedia article. The grey outer ring, inner circle, and pen tip are displayed to show how the mechanics work, but these can be hidden if you just want to see the geometric patterns that result. Either way, when downloading an image, these representations of the physical objects are stripped out, leaving only the patterns." And there's some other fun stuff from him on the site.

    • How we recreated a lost African city with laser technology - Professor Karim Sadr of the University of the Witwatersrand on more cool LIDAR stuff: "There are lost cities all over the world. Some, like the remains of Mayan cities hidden beneath a thick canopy of rainforest in Mesoamerica, are found with the help of laser lights. Now the same technology which located those Mayan cities has been used to rediscover a southern African city that was occupied from the 15th century until about 200 years ago. This technology, called LiDAR, was used to 'redraw' the remains of the city, along the lower western slopes of the Suikerbosrand hills near Johannesburg."

    • Implementing FizzBuzz on an FPGA - Another cool foray into hardware by Ken Shirriff: "I recently started FPGA programming and figured it would be fun to use an FPGA to implement the FizzBuzz algorithm. An FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) is an interesting chip that you can program to implement arbitrary digital logic. This lets you build a complex digital circuit without wiring up individual gates and flip flops. It's like having a custom chip that can be anything from a logic analyzer to a microprocessor to a video generator."

    • Red Berlin: On the Trail of the Soviets - "Dark tourist" Sebastián finds the legacy of the Soviet occupation of Berlin, before the establishment of the DDR: "The supremacy of the Red Army was enshrined in these lavish monuments—imposing mementos of a country that no longer exists, in a country that no longer exists, commemorating a victory over a country that also no longer exists."



    Happy invoicing!

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