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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDIII

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDIII

    This week: correct numbering, with thanks to Scourer
    • The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1 - ”The week of April Fools’ Day of 1981 began badly. That Sunday night my husband told me he was leaving me. He had fallen in love with one of his graduate students, and they were headed back to the tropics the next day… They opened the door of her room, and it was eighteen inches deep of just chaos. The bed had been pulled apart, curtains pulled down, drawers all dumped out. Emily - five and three-quarters - looked at Officer Rodriguez and said, ‘I can’t tell if the burglars were in here or not.’ And Officer Rodriguez, to his eternal credit, did not crack a smile.” Dr Mary-Claire King, among numerous other accomplishments, was the first to prove that a specific gene was involved in many cases of breast cancer. You might think that the headline on this story about a turbulent week at the outset of her career gives away the plot, but believe me, there’s more

    • This Is the Ideal Number of Hours to Work a Day, According to Decades of Science - "An 8-hour workday only make sense if you're screwing in widgets on an assembly line." And it’s not more than eight, either. In fact, it lines up with what I would have said is just about reasonable.

    • The 10 worst Britons in history - Unsurprisingly, many of the people in this list can best be characterised in modern terms as “politicians”: ”The rogue’s gallery includes some famous, and not so famous (or infamous) names: there’s a king, a prime minister and (somewhat surprisingly) a couple of churchmen.”

    • Here's how to shock a millennial - Richard Glover recounts some of the formerly common practices in workplaces that young people can’t even: ”My ballpoint pen stopped working in the middle of a meeting last week… In the 1980s, when I first joined the workforce, having an empty ballpoint pen was a necessary step to earning a new one. There would be a designated person in the office to whom you would present the empty device. They'd check it thoroughly before issuing a new one.”

    • Build a working game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life - An intriguing challenge posted on the Code Golf Stack Exchange led to a worldwide collaboration over the course of eighteen months involving the design and implementation of an entire computer (and a dedicated programming language) from cellular automata: ”Due to the unprecedented scope of this collaboration, this answer is split in parts across multiple answers written by the members of this team… Rather than develop a Tetris game in Life directly, we slowly ratcheted up the abstraction in a series of steps. At each layer, we get further away from the difficulties of Life and closer to the construction of a computer that is as easy to program as any other.”

    • Scientists discover an underwater city full of gloomy octopuses - Probably not what Ringo had in mind: ”The structure, which hosts 23 dens, consists of three patches of rocks, each surrounded by mounds of shells.” There are links to the abstracts of the academic papers, though you’ll need to find a friendly academic (or pay through the nose) to get access to the full text of them.

    • Why You Feel the Urge to Jump - "Have you ever stood in a high place and felt the urge to jump?… The seemingly irrational, but common urge to leap—half of respondents felt it in one survey—can be so disturbing that ruminators from Jean-Paul Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) to anonymous contributors in lengthy Reddit sub-threads have agonized about it.” Jessica Siegel on the psychology of high places.

    • The First Species to Have Every Individual’s Genome Sequenced - …is a cute, flightless parrot: ”The kakapo—once thought extinct—is one of the most thoroughly studied animals on the planet. Every single one of the last 153 kakapos on the planet is known to researchers. Every one carries a radio transmitter, so scientists know its position, as well as its movements and sex life. And soon, a team led by Andrew Digby from the Department of Conservation and Bruce Robertson from the University of Otago will sequence the genomes of all of these birds.”

    • House Address “Twins” Proximity - "I found myself wondering what the shortest distance was between two Address Twins – houses with the same number and the same street-name." Paul Plowman digs through UK postal address data. The ending will surprise you

    • Qatar Digital Library - "The Qatar Digital Library (QDL) is making a vast archive featuring the cultural and historical heritage of the Gulf and wider region freely available online for the first time. It includes archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and much more, complete with contextualised explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic." All kinds of stuff in here, such as this elephant-mounted clock described by Isma‘īl ibn al-Razzāz Jazarī around the twelfth century:



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    [*]House Address “Twins” Proximity - "I found myself wondering what the shortest distance was between two Address Twins – houses with the same number and the same street-name." Paul Plowman digs through UK postal address data. The ending will surprise you


    Happy invoicing!
    You mean your postal address isn't unique
    merely at clientco for the entertainment

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by eek View Post
      You mean your postal address isn't unique
      How quaint, people still live in houses with numbers.
      …Maybe we ain’t that young anymore

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by WTFH View Post
        How quaint, people still live in houses with numbers.
        I looked through the old census records for the house containing my flat. The house was built around 1880 and it's in the record for 1911 that it first has its current number - before that, all the houses on the block were recorded under their names.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by WTFH View Post
          How quaint, people still live in houses with numbers.
          Aw, you renamed your mid-terrace new-build "Ivy cottage"? Was that before or after you fitted the multi-fuel stove with the little propellor on top?
          Originally posted by MaryPoppins
          I'd still not breastfeed a nazi
          Originally posted by vetran
          Urine is quite nourishing

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by d000hg View Post
            Aw, you renamed your mid-terrace new-build "Ivy cottage"? Was that before or after you fitted the multi-fuel stove with the little propellor on top?
            The upstairs was put on our house in 1858, the downstairs is at least 20 years older.

            I remember Ivy Cottage though. Great girl. Used to do a thing with ping pong balls.
            …Maybe we ain’t that young anymore

            Comment


              #7
              Originally posted by WTFH View Post
              The upstairs was put on our house in 1858, the downstairs is at least 20 years older.
              Better than the other way round I suppose.

              Sounds a very similar age to ours. Classic Victorian or would that make it Georgian?
              Originally posted by MaryPoppins
              I'd still not breastfeed a nazi
              Originally posted by vetran
              Urine is quite nourishing

              Comment


                #8
                The twin addressees one was interesting in a suitable nerdy way but even better are the comments below it. They quickly digress into discussions of assorted road related oddities including: roads that are one way for certain classes of vehicle and two way for others; address idiosyncrasies in general; and a wider education of non-UK residents on why having two councils involved in a problem exacerbates the complexity exponentially!
                "Being nice costs nothing and sometimes gets you extra bacon" - Pondlife.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by WTFH View Post
                  The upstairs was put on our house in 1858, the downstairs is at least 20 years older.
                  It's the other way round.

                  Comment

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