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Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DCIV

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    Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DCIV

    As soon as you get rid of Wimbledon and the football, the Olympics turns up. Luckily the Internet is still there until the telly goes back to normal
    • The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I. - ”The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?” This is like that thing about people conversing with Weizenbaum's Eliza writ large.
    • Scientists Pin Down When Earth’s Crust Cracked, Then Came to Life - ”New data indicating that Earth’s surface broke up about 3.2 billion years ago helps clarify how plate tectonics drove the evolution of complex life.” Complex life which was later able to figure out what happened back then. Quite the plot twist, when you think about it
    • 15,000-year-old viruses discovered in Tibetan glacier ice - ”Scientists who study glacier ice have found viruses nearly 15,000 years old in two ice samples taken from the Tibetan Plateau in China. Most of those viruses, which survived because they had remained frozen, are unlike any viruses that have been cataloged to date.” I think we're all bored with the current virus so it's nice to have some new ones
    • Susie Dent’s Introduction To Swearing: The F-Word - That nice lexicographer lady off Countdown on a word you probably still won't see on C4 at teatime, or in CUK come to that: ”What’s the most versatile word in the English language?… If you were to ask any lexicographer for their suggestions, it’s likely that ‘****’ would be near the top of the list. ”
    • Model Citizen - ”Jean-Louis Brenninkmeijer was born into an unfathomably rich European dynasty. He used a little of that wealth—and a lot of tenacity—to build his $24-million miniature version of Canada at Yonge and Dundas. Why? Because it’s cool.” That's what part-owning C&A gets you
    • Red planet has a big core, complex crust - ”For over a Martian year, we've had a seismograph on Mars in the hope that it would help us figure out the red planet's interior… With records of a handful of significant marsquakes, we now have some sense of what Mars' interior looks like. And a set of new studies indicates that it's pretty weird, with a large, light core and an unexpectedly warm crust.”
    • Soft Robotic Hand Is Fast Enough to Play Video Games - ”University of Maryland engineers have created a 3D-printed robot hand capable of playing Nintendo.” So rather than a robot uprising, it'll be robots slumped on the couch refusing to get up and clean their rooms because they're close to a high score?
    • This Shimmering Black Rock Is a 2,000-Year-Old Exploded Brain - ”A shimmering rock found in the ruins of an ancient city has been identified as part of a human brain that exploded due to the heat of a catastrophic volcanic eruption.” Well, we've all had that feeling sometimes.
    • Fraud on the Farm: How a baby-faced CEO turned a Farmville clone into a massive Ponzi scheme - ”Farm Bank let players make money, while supporting real farms. Then the CEO vanished with $80 million.”
    • Hudson River State Hospital, Returning to Hudson River State Hospital - A perilous expedition by Matthew Christopher of Abandoned America: ”Simply put, Hudson River State Hospital may be the most frightening place I've ever been. There was not a single area in the building that I felt safe in, and some of the risks I took to get the pictures I did will stick with me forever… In a very real way devoid of hyperbole or exaggeration I nearly lost my life on several occasions for this set of photographs.”


    Happy invoicing!

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