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Monday Links from Santa's Socially-Distanced Grotto vol. DLXXIII

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    Monday Links from Santa's Socially-Distanced Grotto vol. DLXXIII

    It's the shortest day! Not that it really matters what it's like outside if you're in Tier 4
    • Murders in the Night - A festive serial killer in the 1880s: ”Beginning on December 31, 1884, Austin was the setting for a killing spree unlike any ever before seen in American history… Because the first victims were black, Austin’s white residents initially believed that what was taking place was a ‘Negro problem.’ Some city leaders theorized that a ‘gang’ of depraved black men was committing the crimes, going after black women for reasons of its own. But then came Christmas Eve 1885.”

    • A signal from Proxima? Likely intelligent, unlikely from aliens - ”Astronomers looking for signs of alien life on other planets in the galaxy have found an unusual signal from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, that is... intriguing. It was just a single detection that came and went, but it does have some characteristics you'd expect from an intelligent source. The problem is, as it always is, that source may be us.” Though it might not be

    • Great Conjunction of 2020 According to Islamic Astrology - Today’s conjunction of Jupiter and Mars may herald something or other if astrology is to be believed (which it isn’t): ”Pre-Islamic Greek and Persian astrologers, also expert astronomers, studied the pattern of Jupiter & Saturn conjunctions to forecast the socio political and religious changes on earth. When the Muslims acquired books on various sciences from other cultures, and further developed that knowledge, many Islamic scholars became expert astronomers and astrologists… Unfortunately, in our age knowledge has become very secularized which resulted in astrology being completely divorced from astronomy. Independent astronomy has brought down this science to the level of mere observation and entertainment devoid of any deeper meaning for our lives on earth.”

    • Rocky Flats: The price of peace - ”No human had worked here for 40 years, but Ricky Mote felt ready. He layered on four sets of safety boots and three pairs of gloves and squeezed the rest of his body into two airtight moon suits. Just in case, an ambulance waited. Mote expected some danger while digging up 171 drums of uranium from a trench at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. What he didn't expect, though, was exploding green goo.” The perils of decommissioning a nuclear bomb factory

    • A brief history of the BBC Christmas Tapes - Before blooper shows became mainstream, VT engineers put together compilations for the BBC’s Christmas parties: ”Producers amiably let the engineers loose on their rushes, allowing them to plunder them for amusing goofs, while wilfully allowing (or, more likely, coercing) their star performers into recording little sketches and announcements tailored exclusively for the tape. Needless to say, these tapes (traditionally played at the Christmas party, with duplicated cassettes being handed out to staff in take-home bags with a slice of cake) had an irresistible currency inside the BBC, and it wasn’t long before they leaked out.” Here’s a YouTube playlist of extant tapes for your enjoyment, though some of them seem to have copyright blocks for the UK


    • What Did the Stone Age Sound Like? - Not just people going “ug” and banging rocks together: ”On South Africa’s southern coast, above the mouth of the Matjes River, a natural rock shelter nestles under a cliff face. The cave is only about 3 meters deep, and humans have used it for more than 10,000 years… It is possible that some 8,000 years ago, in this acoustically resonant haven, people not only hid from passing coastal thunderstorms, they may have used this place to commune with their dead—using music. That’s a possibility hinted at in the work of archaeologist Joshua Kumbani, of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and his colleagues.”

    • How an obscure British PC maker invented ARM and changed the world - An enjoyable look back at how the Acorn RISC Machine came about: ”We can all use a feel-good underdog story right now, and luckily our doomscrolling 2020 selves don't have to look very far. That's because those same phones, and so much of our digital existence, run on the same thing: the ARM family of CPUs… it's a good time to remind everyone of the strange and unlikely source these world-controlling chips came from.”

    • The Book of Shaders - An excellent resource for learning how to write fragment shaders, should you need a side project to help pass the time after that Christmas Zoom call: ”This book is about the revolutionary computational technique, fragment shaders, that is taking digitally generated images to the next level… Fragment shaders give you total control over the pixels rendered on the screen at a super fast speed. This is why they're used in all sort of cases, from video filters on cellphones to incredible 3D video games.”

    • Reverse-engineering the clock chip in the first MOS calculator - Ken Shirriff goes back to the Sixties: ”In 1969, Sharp introduced the first calculator built from high-density MOS chips, the QT-8D, followed by the handheld Sharp EL-8, the world's smallest calculator at the time. These calculators were high-end products, selling for $345 (about $1800 today). Integrated circuits at the time couldn't fit the entire calculator on one chip, so these calculators contained five ICs: an arithmetic chip, a decimal point chip, a keypad/display chip, a control chip, and a clock chip. This blog post discusses the clock chip and how it generated the unusual four-phase clock signals required by the calculator.”

    • 116 Photos Of Geometrical Plants For Symmetry Lovers - ”Who said math can’t be interesting? Fractals like these can seem too perfect to be true, but they occur in nature and plants all the time and are examples of math, physics, and natural selection at work!” This is the underside of an Amazonian lily pad



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post

    [*]A signal from Proxima? Likely intelligent, unlikely from aliens - ”Astronomers looking for signs of alien life on other planets in the galaxy have found an unusual signal from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, that is... intriguing. It was just a single detection that came and went, but it does have some characteristics you'd expect from an intelligent source. The problem is, as it always is, that source may be us.” Though it might not be
    it was only zeity and his lizard friends.

    Comment


      #3
      If Rocky Flats is that bad, just imagine what some of the old USSR is like.
      When the fun stops, STOP.

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
        How an obscure British PC maker invented ARM and changed the world - An enjoyable look back at how the Acorn RISC Machine came about: ”We can all use a feel-good underdog story right now, and luckily our doomscrolling 2020 selves don't have to look very far. That's because those same phones, and so much of our digital existence, run on the same thing: the ARM family of CPUs… it's a good time to remind everyone of the strange and unlikely source these world-controlling chips came from.”
        The video on that article was highly entertaining

        Comment


          #5
          Thanks Nick!

          Comment

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