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Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DXLI

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    Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DXLI

    It’s getting increasingly difficult to find stuff that isn’t about one or other aspect of the sodding pandemic, but some is still getting through
    • The Pirates of the Highways - Big trucks, big money - well, sometimes: ”On America’s interstates, brazen bands of thieves steal 18-wheelers filled with computers, cell phones, even toilet paper. And select law enforcement teams are tasked with tracking them down.”

    • What Goes On in a Proton? Quark Math Still Conflicts With Experiments - ”Two ways of approximating the ultra-complicated math that governs quark particles have recently come into conflict, leaving physicists unsure what their decades-old theory predicts.” Breaking: particle physics still very complicated and confusing

    • The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months - A remarkable story from the South Seas: ”One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”

    • Penguin Classics Cover Generator - Just that


    • Physicists Criticize Stephen Wolfram’s ‘Theory of Everything’ - Wolfram has a new way of explaining the universe, maybe, one day, but not everybody’s impressed: ”There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories… Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”

    • How ancient Aboriginal star maps have shaped Australia’s highway network - ”The next time you’re driving down a country road in outback Australia, consider there’s a good chance that very route was originally mapped out by Aboriginal people perhaps thousands of years before Europeans came to Australia.” This assumes, of course, that you’re allowed to travel to Australia in the first place, which is unlikely at the moment

    • 25 Photos Of Masters Of Disguise – Mossy Frogs - ”In nature, camouflage can be a matter of life and death. The ability to blend into one's environment is a crucial survival tactic… One of those camouflage experts is Theloderma corticale, more commonly known as the Vietnamese mossy frog.”


    • SS Report on Questions of Internal Security (12 August, 1943) - This site has a load of interesting stuff from various WWII archives of units such as such as the SOE and MI9; this document from the latter was a captured SS report on the morale-busting activities of British other ranks POWs who, unlike officers tucked up in their camps digging tunnels, were (legitimately under the terms of the Geneva Convention) used as a labour force by the Germans: ”According to numerous reports from various parts of the Reich, the presence in agriculture and industry of British prisoners raises a series of problems… The manner in which the British behave to the population leaves no doubt of their confidence in victory. They take every opportunity to show that Germany will lose the war, and that they will soon be masters in Germany. This assurance of victory and self possession does not fail to impress the people.”

    • A circuit board from the Saturn V rocket, reverse-engineered and explained - Ken Shirriff is keeping busy in lockdown: ”In the Apollo Moon missions, the Saturn V rocket was guided by an advanced onboard computer system built by IBM. This system was built from hybrid modules, similar to integrated circuits but containing individual components. I reverse-engineered a circuit board from this system and determined its function: Inside the computer's I/O unit, the board selected different data sources for the computer.”

    • The Wonderful, Transcendent Life of an Odd-Nosed Monkey - ”The island of Borneo is the only home of the proboscis monkey, an endangered primate that is surprisingly resilient.” Probably toughened up by all the other monkeys making fun of its nose at monkey school



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Thank you. I have seen proboscis monkeys in the wild in Borneo. The locals call them Dutchmen.

    Comment


      #3
      Some other British prisoners were singing a rude song to the tune of "Deutschland uber Alles" as they passed two high German officials in uniform. When one of these officials said "That's going a little too far, my friends", one of the prisoners who understood German called back "We're not your friends, we're British."
      I wonder what they thought of the number of balls senior Nazi's possessed?
      "I can put any old tat in my sig, put quotes around it and attribute to someone of whom I've heard, to make it sound true."
      - Voltaire/Benjamin Franklin/Anne Frank...

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