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Monday Links from the Bench vol. DIX

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. DIX

    I remembered the volume number this week. <finbarr-saunders>It says "dicks"! Fnarr! Fnarr!</finbarr-saunders>
    • Shelved: The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s “Brain Opera” - The Bonzos worked with the Beatles and were a major influence on Monty Python, but the Brain Opera was sadly a project too far. Tom Maxwell looks back on the group and the tragic-comic life of frontman Vivian Stanshall: ”He told the band’s manager that the group needed time off to rehearse songs for the next record, and after much insistence, was given a rehearsal room and a few weeks’ cleared schedule. After ten days, the manager dropped by and demanded to hear the new material, only to find Stanshall had used the time to build hutches for his rabbits, although there’s reason to believe there were never any rabbits.”

    • Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity - ”They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning… Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.” There really is no escape

    • Monitoring a Carrera Slot Car Track with PRTG - HT to DaveB for this one: ”’Why would someone build a 600-yard slot car track in their office?’ you ask. We'll do you one better: Why not?! That's pretty much what got us started. Plus, we wanted to see which aspects of this ginormous project we could monitor using PRTG Network Monitor.” There are a couple more videos too, including this trip around the entire track


    • What's shakin', 67P? Cliff collapses and bouncing boulders on a comet - Phil Plait on some the latest discoveries in the ongoing analysis of the Rosetta/Philae mission to comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko: ”As it nears the Sun the warmth turns the ice on and just under the surface into gas… The change in thermal conditions also disrupts the comet's structure, especially when cliffs and overhangs cemented by ice suddenly give way. All sorts of fun things happen then.”

    • Inside the Fleet: exploring London’s lost rivers - Peter Watts ventures beneath central London: ”It’s only as the filthy brown water rises above my thigh-high waders and my feet struggle to grip the tunnel’s slimy floor that I realise that drowning in a river of tulip after breaking into a London sewer would be a really, really crap way to die.”

    • Witches - ”The Data and Visualisation internship project at the University of Edinburgh had as its core aim to geographically locate and visualise the different locations recorded within the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database.” In other words: maps! Including accused witches’ places of residence, trial, and execution.

    • Shanghai's 1933 Slaughterhouse - ”Built in 1933 in pre-Communist Shanghai, the four-story building was designed by British architects and built by Chinese developers with British concrete. Today the building is an eerie Gotham-Deco achievement in concrete, glass, and steel, and the last remaining of its design in the world.” There’s more about the building at From slaughter to laughter: the renovation of a slaughterhouse in Shanghai by IPPR.


    • The Pee Tape Is Real, but It’s Fake - Ashley Feinberg on the infamous Trump pee tape, and a suspiciously well-made fake that’s available online (not embedded here because I suspect video of hookers pissing would be frowned upon by the mods): ”The more I tried to prove to myself it wasn’t real, the less confident I became in my own skepticism. This was, however, also a very, very powerful reason to keep believing it was fake: that the most extraordinarily damaging piece of evidence against the president could just be waiting there, in plain sight, with no one doing anything about it. If there are any lessons we should have learned by this point, in 2019, they’re that nothing could ever be that easy, and that few enough things are real.”

    • CPU Adventure – Unknown CPU Reversing - ”tl;dr: We reverse-engineered a program written for a completely custom, unknown CPU architecture, without any documentation for the CPU (no emulator, no ISA reference, nothing) in the span of ten hours.” Amazing work by the CMU PPP team. This reminds of the guy I used to work with who reverse-engineered the 6502 when he was about nine years old by poking values into his parents’ Commodore PET’s memory, executing them, and examining the CPU and memory’s state afterwards

    • Fotoserie der U-Bahnen Europas - Nice collection of photos of various underground rail systems from around Europe: www.ubahn.photos – and its English partner domain www.subway.photos – is a strictly non-commercial, self-funding documentary photo project publishing its artistically minded photo series in the internet free of adverts, free of charge and being accessible for everyone, as taking a stand against times where only commerce counts.” This one’s in Budapest:



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    Inside the Fleet: exploring London’s lost rivers - Peter Watts ventures beneath central London: ”It’s only as the filthy brown water rises above my thigh-high waders and my feet struggle to grip the tunnel’s slimy floor that I realise that drowning in a river of tulip after breaking into a London sewer would be a really, really crap way to die.”

    :
    Most 4 year olds would have the cognitive ability to determine that. This bloke clearly shouldn't be allowed out by himself.

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by PhiltheGreek View Post
      Most 4 year olds would have the cognitive ability to determine that. This bloke clearly shouldn't be allowed out by himself.
      I found a newspaper article from the 1890s that described the fate of lad who was stupid enough to attempt to jump across an open manhole.

      Not a nice way to go.
      When the fun stops, STOP.

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by DoctorStrangelove View Post
        I found a newspaper article from the 1890s that described the fate of lad who was stupid enough to attempt to jump across an open manhole.

        Not a nice way to go.
        Taught him a lesson, I bet he didn't try that stupid stunt again!
        Last edited by Zigenare; 30 September 2019, 14:57.
        Old Greg - In search of acceptance since Mar 2007. Hoping each leap will be his last.

        Comment

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