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Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. CDXCI

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    Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. CDXCI

    Another Bank Holiday, another collection of excuses to tell the kids that no, you can't take them to the zoo as you have a lot of important stuff to read
    • The Night The Lights Went Out - ”I am the least reliable narrator when it comes to the story of my brain exploding. This is because, from the time right before I suffered a freakish brain hemorrhage last year to the time I regained full consciousness roughly two weeks later, I remember nothing. My mind is an absolute blank. It’s like the fabled pause in the Nixon Tapes. I was not here. That time of my life may as well not exist. Oh, but it did.” Drew Magary on having, and recovering from, a subdural haematoma

    • Bonobo Mothers Are Very Concerned About Their Sons’ Sex Lives - ”Bonobos live in mostly matriarchal societies, where females both occupy the highest ranks and form the core of social groups. If sons stick close to their mother, they’re more likely to end up at the center of a community… they would stop unrelated males from interfering with their sons’ sexual encounters. They’d interfere themselves, stopping unrelated males from mating with other females.” Mother is a boy bonobo's best friend, it seems. Here's the original paper, for those of you who like sources: Males with a mother living in their group have higher paternity success in bonobos but not chimpanzees.

    • Fun with Snapchat's Gender Swapping Filter - Apparently there's a new Snapchat filter that lets you swap gender, and here Eric Jang plays with it to develop some hypotheses about how it works: ”I signed up for Snapchat and fiddled around with it this morning to try and figure out what's going on under the hood and how I might break it… this is not a serious exercise in reverse-engineering Snapchat's IPA file or studying how other apps engineer similar features; it's just some basic hypothesis testing into when it works and when it doesn't, plus a little narcissistic bathroom selfie fun.”


    • Omni - Intriguing tool created by Luke Phillips, for playing with musical scales: ”I've picked 40 of my favourites which can be played by swiping the keys at the bottom. Each scale is simply a collection of tones that can be played in different key signatures and I've included a short blurb about each one. They have roots from cultures all around the world and some have been in existence for over 50,000 years. The pitch constellation circle will tell you where the tones are situated within an octave.”

    • The Secret Language of Plants - ”Up in the northern Sierra Nevada, the ecologist Richard Karban is trying to learn an alien language. The sagebrush plants that dot these slopes speak to one another, using words no human knows… The evidence for plant communication is only a few decades old, but in that short time it has leapfrogged from electrifying discovery to decisive debunking to resurrection.” They're probably working hand in glove with the spiders :

    • Airline Logos - Nice collection of classic airline logos, put together by Reagan Ray: ”Mid-century airline vibes seem to be all the rage these days… While this blog post was mostly driven by the classic logos of now-defunct airlines like TWA, Pan-Am, and Eastern (which could warrant blog posts of their own), I discovered a lot of great branding for regional and commuter airlines in the process.” US airlines only, but the US has had a lot of airlines in its time.


    • The Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die - ”When Mark Olmsted contracted HIV, in the early 1980s, he figured the disease was a death sentence. And so he hatched a scheme to live out his last years in style—swiping credit cards, bilking insurance companies, even faking his own death. What’s the problem with some forgery, fraud, and crystal meth if you’ll soon be gone? A better question might have been: What the hell happens if you survive?” A bit Breaking Bad, this tale

    • Going Critical - ”As much as I've thought about networks over the years, I didn't appreciate (until very recently) the importance of simple diffusion. This is our topic for today: the way things move and spread, somewhat chaotically, across a network.” Very interesting interactive exploration of the factors that affect the spread of just about anything between interconnected entities, by Kevin Simler.

    • Zork And The Z-Machine: Bringing The Mainframe To 8-bit Home Computers - Following on from the recent uploading of the source code to Infocom's classic adventures (see Easter's links for details) this article looks at how Zork started out on mainframes, and was then ported to early 8-bit micros: ”Zork Implementation Language (ZIL), makes heavy use of the brand-new concept of object-oriented programming, and runs on a virtual machine. All this back in 1979. They used every trick in the book to pack as much of the Underground Empire into computers that had only 32 kB of RAM.”

    • The Rendering Eye - A collection of some of the odd creations of Apple's 3D Flyover feature, that tries with varying degrees of success to generate 3D views from photographs: ”The application`s renderings of buildings and streets have elicited criticism and mockery, since the maps and the corresponding images are not without errors... It is these ‘errors’ that provide my project`s point of departure… The Apple Maps program produces cityscapes that are the pure invention of ceaselessly calculating image-generating machines linked between Cupertino, California and our own homes —and that show real places even so.” This dry-docked ship is in Cape Town:



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Brill tale of the HIV/AIDS survivor! What a top find.

    Comment


      #3
      I run Zork under CP/M on one of these...



      Purchased from RC 2014

      And one of these...

      ESP8266

      See here for details...
      hackaday.io cpm 8266

      Available from Adafruit amongst others...
      The home of Lady Ada!
      Old Greg - In search of acceptance since Mar 2007. Hoping each leap will be his last.

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by ladymuck View Post
        Brill tale of the HIV/AIDS survivor! What a top find.
        WLMS

        Comment

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