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Monday Links from the Bench vol. DVI

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. DVI

    I see the news isn't getting any better, and the weather is pretty bleak. Luckily, there's lots of stuff like this to help you ignore all that
    • The People Lost Between Consciousness and Death - ”Doctors told his parents that his brain was irreparably damaged after it had been starved of oxygen for hours. His body remained, but the son they knew was gone. He was almost completely unresponsive to the world around him. And yet he was conscious the whole time.” An unknown number of people thought to be in a vegetative state aren't

    • How science may help us smell the past - ”Unlike sight and sound, which can be measured quantitatively, odor often exists in a world of metaphor and subjectivity… Part of our difficulty in describing smells is a lack of common vocabulary with which to do so.” Interesting look at ongoing efforts to establish a standard way of characterising smells.

    • Earthglance - There’s always room for another site showing cool pictures from Google Earth



      Ship Transits Gulf of Urabá

    • The Wonder Drug for Aging (Made From One of the Deadliest Toxins on Earth) - Making Botox requires extremely tight security, given the nature of the source material: ”A baby-aspirin-size amount of powdered toxin is enough to make the global supply of Botox for a year… A study published in 2001 in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that a single gram in crystallized form, ‘evenly dispersed and inhaled, would kill more than 1 million people.’” It’s made in Westport, Ireland, by the way. Here, to be precise.

    • An Entire Scientific Observatory at The Bottom of The Ocean Mysteriously Vanished - ”When the Boknis Eck Observatory - an environmental monitoring station on the floor of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Germany - stopped sending data on 21 August, scientists thought there was a problem with the data transmission. But when they sent divers down to check, the whole 740-kilogram (1,630-pound) car-sized kit and kaboodle was just… gone. Completely vanished.” Funnily enough, I reread The Kraken Wakes just a few days ago

    • Encounters With a Rare White-Topped Carnivore - Matt, a botanist, meets the white-topped pitcher plant: ”I will never forget the first time I laid eyes on one of these plants. It was at a carnivorous plant club meeting… This was the first time I had seen Sarracenia leucophylla. At that point I knew I had to see such a beauty in the wild.”


    • Enigma machine - By Tom MacWright, an interactive simulation of the Enigma, demonstrating how the signals travel through the mechanism to encrypt text: ”The Enigma Machine is an especially neat thing to visualize because it was electromechanical. As you used it, it moved. Instead of circuit traces, it had beautiful real wires connecting its pieces.”

    • EUVS Digital Collection: A Library for Bartenders - A large collection of scans of books about making drinks: ”The bartending profession has a rich and varied history that only recently has come to light during the past two decades. Vintage cocktail and distillation books filled with recipes, techniques, and management procedures are being unearthed and collected at an unprecedented pace.”


    • The Ghosts of Windows 3.1 - Ernie Smith revisits some of the more unusual applications of the first version of Windows that didn’t entirely suck, ”including a hated CD-i competitor and an unusual update of the Commodore 64.”

    • scificorridorarchive - ”scificorridorarchive.com is a Tumblr blog that compiles a selection of the archive I built for Case Study: Sci-Fi Corridor, an art project about corridors in science fiction film.” This one’s from The Andromeda Strain (1971).



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Good links this week, I likes em. Thanks.

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