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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDLV

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDLV

    Remember the good old days when everybody went to the pub at lunchtime? Now you have to listen to the permies droning on about their weekend standing by the office microwave; OR you can take refuge in the Internet:
    • How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars? - "For generations, people have imagined life on the Martian surface in extraordinary detail, from how drinking water will be purified to how fresh food will be grown, but there is another question that remains unanswered: How will Mars be policed?" Geoff Manaugh considers this intriguing question

    • This tiny worm hasn't had sex in 18 million years - "Diploscapter pachys… seems to have developed a different way of copying its genes — one that leads to just enough mutations to give the worms room to adapt, but not enough to cause crippling defects." SFW

    • Deepwater Horizon Blowout Animation - HT to quackhandle for this explanation of how Deepwater Horizon went up.


    • We asked 12 mass killers: 'What would have stopped you?' - "In America today, mass shootings remain the most terrible metric that distinguishes the country from the rest of the world. And thanks to a 22-year Federal ban on researching their causes, getting inside the minds of those responsible is largely the work of private investigators. For British journalist Alex Hannaford, who lives in Texas with his wife and daughter, when fear of the next attack became acute, he wrote to the 50 perpetrators currently incarcerated to find out how much danger he and his family face. Twelve wrote back..." One of the weirdest things here is the "Federal ban on researching their causes" - paid for by the NRA, of course

    • Sex, Lies, and Grappling Hooks: How Parasitic Beetles Trick Bees - "Imagine going on a first date with someone whose perfume drives you wild. But when you lean in for that first kiss, you realize your suitor is actually nothing more than a writhing mass of parasitic blister beetle larvae." Or, the home life of Melania Trump

    • Using Medieval DNA to track the barbarian spread into Italy - Where Italians came from: "We know very little of [the Lombards] or any of the other barbarian tribes that roared through Western Europe other than roughly contemporary descriptions of where they came from. But a study of the DNA left behind in the cemeteries of the Longobards provides some indication of their origins and how they interacted with the Europeans they encountered."

    • A Working Class Kid | Wayne Waterson’s Images of Hackney during the 1970s & 80s. - "Hackney between the 1960s and 1980s was its own world, nobody ever came in from outside of the borough for fear of violence, which was real and had to be negotiated daily even for those who lived there. Hoxton was not the playground of the middle classes or the fashionista’s as it is today."


    • The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Perfume - "If given the choice to smell like whale excrement or delicate white flowers, few people would chose the first option." Yet, in fact, ambergris smells rather pleasant, while jasmine essence smells quite nasty

    • Feast your eyes on comet 67P's surface, with depth cues added - Mattias Malmer does a little post-processing of the Philae lander's holiday snaps: "On comet 67P, the atmospheric cues that our eyes have evolved to judge distances on Earth are not present, so everything has the same sharp contrast… I wanted to help my eyes perceive the landscape in a more familiar way, so I added some human-readable depth cues."

    • On Top Of Britannic House With Lew Tassell - More photos of London, this time from the top of the first building in the City taller than St. Pauls: "In the summer of 1983, I was part of the City of London Serious Fraud Squad, operating from Wood St Police Station. A friend and ex-colleague of mine became head of security at British Petroleum in Britannic House, Ropemaker St and he invited me to photograph the views of London from the rooftop, so I took the opportunity. I went along one June morning and took my pictures."



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    https://www.sciencealert.com/how-a-p...f645-365897729

    Comment


      #3
      Ah, the infamous leftpad incident

      As somebody pointed out on Twitter at the time, the code (which was really one or two lines, the rest being boilerplate for NPM's module system) wasn't even very good; IIRC, it was quadratic in the length of the output string, and there are many more efficient algorithms available

      Comment


        #4
        Bit boring this week Nick, please try harder next time.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by DimPrawn View Post
          Bit boring this week Nick, please try harder next time.
          Refund in the post

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