Monday Links from the Non-Lockdown vol. DCXIII

[NickFitz]

Very hectic day so far, and I suspect things will carry on that way until they suddenly improve when this gig ends at COB Thursday

• But Who Tells Them What To Sing? - Adrian Daub on the art and business of choral singing in movie soundtracks: ”Thus another Hollywood tradition was born: film choruses belting out perfectly nonsensical prose with utter conviction… In thinking through how film choruses make meaning, I became obsessed with what the process of recording a soundtrack looks like today and at what point in that process someone actually writes lyrics in fake Tibetan.”
• Footprint Discovery Hints at Humans in the Americas More Than 20,000 Years Ago - ”Along the edges of a vanished ice age lake are the fossilized tracks of people who lived among the mammoths, giant ground sloths and other Pleistocene mammals of ancient New Mexico. There were so many prehistoric pedestrians here that their feet pressed the seeds of a local plant called spiral ditch grass into their tracks, and these plant remnants are what has given archaeologists a possible time for when people lived here.” Another take on this story from NatGeo: Stunning footprints push back human arrival in Americas by thousands of years.
• A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June - and it's currently outperforming the S&P 500 - ”The livestreamed hamster, named Mr. Goxx, has been independently trading a portfolio of various cryptocurrencies since June 12… As of Friday, the portfolio was up nearly 24%.”
• File Not Found - HT to ladymuck for this story about the growing phenomenon of students not understanding what a file system is: ”She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’ multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.” Astronomer Saavik Ford tweeted about this a few weeks ago; I replied to the thread suggesting explaining it in terms of playlists, and playlists of playlists, as I assume young people have some familiarity with those :
• Bull geoglyph twice as old as Nazca Lines (Peru), predating Uffington Horse (UK) found in Siberia - ”Pebble and sandstone bull 3 by 4 metres is the first animal geoglyph discovered in this part of the world… The stone bull was part of an Early Bronze Era burial more than 4,000 years ago, making the geoglyth one thousand years older than England’s chalk-cut White Horse, and twice as old as the Nazca Lines in Peru.”
• To Be a Field of Poppies - ”The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost.” This seems like a good way of dealing with human remains
• The 900-year-old mystery of the missing supernova has finally been solved - ”The story begins in 1181 CE. On August 6, Chinese and Japanese astronomers saw a ‘new’ star in the sky, what they called a ‘Guest Star.’ It brightened over time before fading… This sighting in 1181 CE is the only one in the past millennium not to have an associated nebula.” But it looks like they’ve probably found it at last.
• What animals think of death - ”Having a concept of death, far from being a uniquely human feat, is a fairly common trait in the animal kingdom.” Interesting look at what it means when animals pretend to be dead.
• The Robot Wars Poetry Collection - ”I’ve discovered that, scandalously, there is nowhere on the Internet that collects every single rhyme Craig Charles signed off Robot Wars with on one page. Enjoy.” Now this is the kind of thing Tim Berners-Lee had in mind ”We break Health & Safety laws, we’re on fire, we’re Robot Wars!”
• The remains of Buchanan Castle in Scotland - Rudolf Hess was taken here upon his arrival in the UK, but even such historical associations couldn’t save it: ”After the war ended the building was briefly used as the Army School of Education, but in 1954 the roof was removed to avoid paying tax on the property and outlying parts of the building were demolished and left to nature… The castle grounds themselves are covered in creeping plants that are slowly covering all of the outer walls that still remain at their full height, as well most of the bartizans and dormer pediments.”
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[DoctorStrangelove]

Ah. Files. Directories. Folders.

No. You can't call that assembler file "fred.asm.asm" it won't fecking work, the assembler program doesn't know what it is.

Oh how I larfed.

Half a handout describing how to create a directory & a file, many trees died for this.

[ladymuck]

• To Be a Field of Poppies - ”The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost.” This seems like a good way of dealing with human remains

I liked this! I will have to see if it's allowed in the UK

[OwlHoot]

[*]File Not Found - HT to ladymuck for this story about the growing phenomenon of students not understanding what a file system is: ”She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’ multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.” Astronomer Saavik Ford tweeted about this a few weeks ago; I replied to the thread suggesting explaining it in terms of playlists, and playlists of playlists, as I assume young people have some familiarity with those

That's incredible, and no doubt the same must apply to shells and command lines. Young people must be extra baffled and mystified when thrillers and SF films show hackers hunched over a screen showing lines of green print gobbledook scrolling past!

[*]To Be a Field of Poppies - ”The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost.” This seems like a good way of dealing with human remains

Vaccum dry to a featherweight husk, remove silicone and assorted gadgets such as pacemakers, burn what little remains to a small pile of ashes, remove ironmongery such as titanium hips, crunch to powder, add a few drops of acid to neutralise PH (possibly?), and throw what is left on this poppy field. That's the only way one can efficiently dispose of the 10,000,000,000 bodies which will pile up over the next century or so. Plots in peaceful country churchyards will soon be a thing of the past.

[*]What animals think of death - ”Having a concept of death, far from being a uniquely human feat, is a fairly common trait in the animal kingdom.” Interesting look at what it means when animals pretend to be dead.

Haven't read that article yet, but I must say I'm sceptical that "playing dead" indicates intimations of mortality in the minds of animals, if that's what is claimed or suggested. It seems a pretty obvious evolutionary step from simply freezing in the face of danger. "If in doubt, do nowt, even up to a point if a potential predator is pecking or pawing at you!".

[GJABS]

[*]A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June - and it's currently outperforming the S&P 500 - ”The livestreamed hamster, named Mr. Goxx, has been independently trading a portfolio of various cryptocurrencies since June 12… As of Friday, the portfolio was up nearly 24%.” [/LIST]

Here he is..