Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCC

[NickFitz]

300!

• Fukushima - Arkadiusz Podniesiński, who has previously documented the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in two films, visits and photographs the exclusion zones around the Japanese nuclear plant: ”The decision not to come to Fukushima until four years after the disaster is a deliberate one, as most of the destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami has been cleared up. Above all, I would like to focus on the accident at the nuclear power station and the effects it had on the environment and the evacuated residents, and compare it to Chernobyl. For this reason, what I would like to do the most is see the orange zone and the red zone, the most contaminated and completely deserted. In the latter, no clearing up or decontamination work is going on. Here time has stood still, as if the accident happened yesterday.”
  
  
• The Avenger - "After three decades, has the brother of a victim of the Lockerbie bombing solved the case?" Ken Dornstein believes he has finally identified the Libyan agent who armed the bomb that brought down Flight 103.
  
  
• ‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness - The story of Kit Williams’ Masquerade, which had otherwise normal people digging up fields in 1979: ”Masquerade sold two million copies in the first few years, and readers went mad—sometimes literally—trying to suss out the location of the golden hare. Based on hunches, resonances, illusory references, coincidental results from imagined codes, and genuine mistakes, “Masqueraders” dug up acres of countryside, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, wrote tens of thousands of letters to Williams, and occasionally got stuck halfway up cliffs or were apprehended by police while trespassing on historic properties.”
  
  
• The Cloud Appreciation Society - ”At The Cloud Appreciation Society we love clouds, we’re not ashamed to say it and we’ve had enough of people moaning about them. Read our manifesto and see how we are fighting the banality of ‘blue-sky thinking’.” The bad news: you’ve just missed their conference, which took place at the Royal Geographical Society last Saturday. The good news: There’s a Cloud Appreciation Society
  
  
• I Gave My Cat An Enema - HT to mudskipper for this tale, which you may not want to read while eating lunch: ”Fred would get blocked up, I would take him in for a "cleansing" and he would be okay for a few days, only to bind up again… the weekly enema bills were starting to pile up. It was costing me 15 bucks a week to get my cat flushed out!”
  
  
• The History of the Bar Code - "Inventor Joe Woodland drew the first bar code in sand in Miami Beach, decades before technology could bring his vision to life.” Gavin Weightman on the story behind the ubiquitous UPC.
  
  
• The Inside Story Behind MS08-067 - John Lambert on tracking down a zero-day vulnerability in Windows: ”We explained the basic facts. We had a vulnerabilty, that could be exploited remotely, anonymously, that affected all versions of Windows. It was wormable and someone was already exploiting it. When you say the word ‘wormable’ to a crisis manager, it activates some latent response DNA. In his quiet way he went from 1 to 11 and immediately got to work mobilizing everyone. Scarred by Code Red and Blaster, when an issue is wormable, at Microsoft everyone shows up and works it as job #1.”
  
  
• The Ghosts of Pickering Trail - Will Hunt and Matt Wolfe on one family’s home, the legal complexities around buying or selling a house where violent deaths have occurred, and Randall Bell, the world’s leading expert in appraising such properties: ”Some houses can be effectively destroyed by stigma. Such “incurable” properties—Class X on the Bell Chart—are almost invariably demolished. The most stigmatized residence Bell has studied was Jeffrey Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment. Dahmer, who murdered and defiled 17 men and boys, didn’t just pull down the value of his apartment or his apartment building, but that of the entire neighborhood.”
  
  
• Chim-Chim-Cher-ee: When Inventions Stealing Jobs was Popular - TIL, a chimney sweep’s brush-on-a-pole contrivance is called a scandiscope, and was invented by George Smart in 1803: ”What I find most fascinating about this case, however, was the fact that it was an invention purposefully and popularly designed to cause unemployment… Indeed, it had a popular campaign behind it, in the form of the grandly titled Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys in Cleaning Chimneys.”
  
  
• Comics I Don’t Understand - HT to Zeity for this excellent blog cataloguing comics that seem to be rather more recondite than their creator perhaps realised:
  
  
  

And why not celebrate the 300th ML with norrahe's most important post of all time: Makin' Bacon

Happy invoicing!

[xoggoth]

Can't be bothered to look for the link but read once before that animals are thriving round Chernobyl, no significant signs of genetic problems. Maybe radiation is actually good for you!

PS Presumably the tunnelling out is reference to The Great Escape, when they wandered in the yard tipping sand from their trousers.

[Tensai]

Arkadiusz Podniesiński, who has previously documented the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in two films, visits and photographs the exclusion zones around the Japanese nuclear plant: ”The decision not to come to Fukushima until four years after the disaster is a deliberate one, as most of the destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami has been cleared up. Above all, I would like to focus on the accident at the nuclear power station and the effects it had on the environment and the evacuated residents, and compare it to Chernobyl. For this reason, what I would like to do the most is see the orange zone and the red zone, the most contaminated and completely deserted. In the latter, no clearing up or decontamination work is going on. Here time has stood still, as if the accident happened yesterday.”

Wow, thanks for that link. I lived on one of the red-zone towns in the mid-90s as an English teacher. It's weird to see it look like a scene from the Walking Dead now. I actually played football at the nuclear plant, they had a pitch for the staff sports club.

I still wonder how many of the kids I taught have survived.

[northernladuk]

[*]Comics I Don’t Understand - HT to Zeity for this excellent blog cataloguing comics that seem to be rather more recondite than their creator perhaps realised:

I thought some of those were funny. I'm not sure it's down to my superior intellect or because I'm thick as a brick though.