Sunny out for a change, so dodge that harmful UV by remaining hunched over your computer reading this lot 
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- Selfie Deaths Are an Epidemic - From skyscraper roofs to wild bears, people keep dying seeking out the perfect Instagram shot: ”Termed “killfies” by some social media researchers, these accidental deaths have involved social media personalities and, of course, adventurers… Selfies have resulted in peloton crashes at the Tour de France and may have contributed to a helicopter crash over New York City in March 2018.”
- When Beauty Gets in the Way of Science - Sabine Hossenfelder argues that physicists' obsession with subjective notions of "simplicity" have an adverse effect on research: ”It has become common practice among particle physicists to use arguments from beauty to select the theories they deem worthy of further study. These criteria of beauty are subjective and not evidence-based… Relying on relative simplicity is good scientific practice. The desire that a theory be simple in absolute terms, in contrast, is a criterion from beauty: There is no deep reason that the laws of nature should be simple.”
- How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer - Gregory Travis, software engineer and pilot, on Boeing's 737 problem: ”The flight computers do a lot of things, but their main job is to fly the plane when commanded to do so and to make sure the human pilots don’t do anything wrong when they’re flying it… The flight management computer is a computer. What that means is that it’s not full of aluminum bits, cables, fuel lines, or all the other accoutrements of aviation. It’s full of lines of code. And that’s where things get dangerous.”
- Identical packs of Skittles and Follow-up: I found two identical packs of Skittles, among 468 packs with a total of 27,740 Skittles - ”Analyzing packs of Skittles (or sometimes M&Ms) seems to be a very common exercise in introductory statistics. How many candies are in each pack? How many candies of each individual color? Are the colors uniformly distributed?” Clearly the only way to answer these questions is to buy hundreds of packs of Skittles and analyse them all; so that's what the statistician blogger behind Possibly Wrong did
- The Disturbing World of Sonic Fanfic - ”Do you ever feel like you're not entirely the same as everyone else, that the world is depraved and full of weird perverts? I know we're not supposed to kinkshame, but if you've ever had the gross misfortune to stumble upon the world of fan fiction you'll have been exposed to some of the darker, more messed-up, elements of humanity… Nowhere is this more evident than the troublingly popular sub-genre of erotic Sonic The Hedgehog fan creations. Here's a brief sampling of the weirder, more awful, examples of amateur storytelling featuring the asexual hedgehog.”
- The Most Political Animal - Norway has wolves, which is good for the wolves, but not all the humans are happy about it: ”During the decades in which wolves and other predators had been scarce or absent, Norwegian farmers had begun allowing their sheep to scatter in the mountains each summer, believing that dispersed animals could make the most of the sparse vegetation… Polls consistently showed that the majority of Norwegians supported wolf recovery, but as the sheep and dog casualties mounted, the pitch and volume of the complaints increased.”
- Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi - Notre-Dame de Paris catches fire, and suddenly people who've never previously thought about mediæval stained glass for a single second are rending their garments and gnashing their teeth over it on Facebook
You, having good taste and refined sensibilities, are course aware that Britain has shedloads - well, churchloads - of the stuff, and here's a site that's catalogued it all: ”In Great Britain, the CVMA is a British Academy Research Project, hosted by the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York… Select a county from either the Map or the County List below to view individual sites. Note that the counties are named as they were prior to the reorganization of 1974.” Of course they are Anyway, you can now find some stained glass to keep the kids enthralled this Bank Holiday. This one's just up the road from me at Leicester's Guildhall:
- Team finds tiny fragment of a comet inside a meteorite - ”A tiny piece of the building blocks from which comets formed has been discovered inside a primitive meteorite… It belongs to a class of primitive carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that have undergone minimal changes since they formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, likely beyond the orbit of Jupiter.” Honestly, bits of the Universe seem to get everywhere
- Infocom source code, ZIL and the Z-Machine, What is ZIL anyway? - From the third link: ”The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem.” What's that all about, you ask? Well, Jason Scott of textfiles.com and the Internet Archive has uploaded the source code to Infocom's classic text adventures such as Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to GitHub, sparking much interest and a lot of activity around ZIL, the Zork Implementation Language in which they were written. The repository is in the first link, and the second two are just some of the stuff available on the subject, with more happening even as I link. So now you can send the family off to look at stained glass while you stay at home learning how to write adventure games in a LISP-based language from the late 1970s
- Pysanka - ”What is a pysanka? Simply put, it is an Easter egg decorated using a wax resist (aka batik) method… But it is much more than that. Ukrainians have been decorating eggs, creating these miniature jewels, for countless generations. There is a ritualistic element involved, magical thinking, a calling out to the gods and goddesses for health, fertility, love, and wealth. There is a yearning for eternity, for the sun and stars, for whatever gods that may be.” Happy Ukrainian Easter!
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