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Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCLIV

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    Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCLIV

    Sorry it's late again, but even reading the Internet is tiring in this heat
    • A Plane of Monkeys, a Pandemic, and a Botched Deal: Inside the Science Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of - ”Experts say there’s a dire shortage of primates for biomedical research—and it’s putting human lives at risk.” Jackie Flynn Mogensen investigates the murky business of supplying primates to labs.
    • This Fungus Has More Than 17,000 Sexes - ”Advances in sequencing technologies have finally allowed researchers to zero in on the genetic diversity underlying the incredible mating system of shelf fungi.” Don't tell the Tories, they'll burst a blood vessel trying to work out which ones to call "mother"
    • Did the Vikings Actually Torture Victims With the Brutal ‘Blood Eagle’? - ”In popular lore, few images are as synonymous with Viking brutality as the “blood eagle,” a practice that allegedly found torturers separating the victim’s ribs from their spine, pulling their bones and skin outward to form a set of “wings,” and removing their lungs from their chest cavity.” But would it work?
    • Atari is 50! How about a Star Wars Easter Egg? - ”A while back, I wrote about the development of Atari’s Star Wars arcade cabinet… Since writing that piece, I’ve had the good fortune to interview Mike Halley and had further discussions with Jed Margolin about the development of the game. Of all the things we discussed, it was one small thing that I found most interesting, and that was information about a relatively unknown (I think!) Easter Egg in the game.” Quite a cool one, given that you risk blowing up your arcade machine's vector monitor if you try to find it
    • Rapped Knuckles All Round - Tracking down a continuity error in Yes, Minister: ”Someone doing the checking noticed a slight mistake in one of Nigel’s long speeches… What no one had noticed was that since Nigel recorded the speech the first time there had been intervening scenes with costume changes, and Nigel was wearing the wrong tie.”
    • Absurd Trolley Problems - The usual question of whether you throw the switch to divert the trolley, but in increasingly ridiculous situations
    • The Interrobang Is 60?! - ”Yes, dear reader: It’s been six decades since adman Martin K. Speckter announced to the world that what we needed was a single piece of punctuation to do the job of both a question mark and an exclamation point. It was the spring of ’62 when he proposed what came to be known as the interrobang.” All you need to know about this underused bit of punctuation. Or is it‽
    • ‘No Aliens, No Spaceships, No Invasion of Earth’ An oral history of Contact, the sci-fi movie that defied Hollywood norms and made it big anyway. - ”Ahead of Contact’s 25th anniversary, we spoke to nearly two dozen people involved in its making, including Zemeckis, Foster, McConaughey, Druyan, Sasha Sagan, and veteran producer Lynda Obst. They disagreed on several aspects of Contact’s development saga, but settled on some consensus: Contact was a lightning-in-a-bottle project, the kind of thing big movie studios barely made before and would probably never make again — intellectually challenging, emotionally messy, heavy with metaphor, wherein nobody shoots an alien in the face in front of an American flag.”
    • Reverse-engineering the Apollo spacecraft's FM radio - Ken Shirriff gets his hands on yet more Apollo circuitry: ”How did NASA communicate with the Apollo astronauts, hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth? The premodulation processor1 (below) was the heart of the communication system onboard the Apollo spacecraft. Its multiple functions included an FM radio for communication to the astronauts, implemented by the Voice Detector, the module second from the top. In this blog post, I reverse-engineer the circuitry for that module and explain how it worked.”
    • $8,879,000 Worth of the World's Most Complicated and Unusual Mechanical Watches - ”If money is no object but you still struggle to be on time, there's an obscenely over-engineered watch out there for you.” One for you watch lovers. This Jacob & Co. Astronomia Tourbillon is only $548,000


    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Re Apollo Moon landings FM Radio; Kettering Grammar School, used modified radio equipment, track the U.S. spacecraft.
    "A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices," George Orwell

    Comment


      #3
      This Fungus Has More Than 17,000 Sexes - ”Advances in sequencing technologies have finally allowed researchers to zero in on the genetic diversity underlying the incredible mating system of shelf fungi.” Don't tell the Tories, they'll burst a blood vessel trying to work out which ones to call "mother"


      Mmmm. Now I know what I want to be in the next life.
      bloggoth

      If everything isn't black and white, I say, 'Why the hell not?'
      John Wayne (My guru, not to be confused with my beloved prophet Jeremy Clarkson)

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
        ”Experts say there’s a dire shortage of primates for biomedical research
        Have they tried the House of Commons?

        Comment


          #5
          Gosh. Is that a carbon composition 47k resistor I spy in that Apollo module?

          And a 10k.

          And a 22uF 15V metal case tantalum capacitor. Now those are seriously expensive*.

          And a Collins ?mechanical? bandpass filter.

          *turns out it's the wet tants that are expensive, the axial ones are quite reasonable.
          Last edited by DoctorStrangelove; 12 July 2022, 11:50.
          When the fun stops, STOP.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
            [*]Absurd Trolley Problems - The usual question of whether you throw the switch to divert the trolley, but in increasingly ridiculous situations

            Well I solved philosophy and only killed 70 people in the process.

            Comment


              #7
              Originally posted by ladymuck View Post

              Well I solved philosophy and only killed 70 people in the process.
              I got bored, do you get a score at the end or a report you can show people?

              There are some weird results in there but also fairly obviously a lot of people clearly mucking about (the Amazon parcel one).
              Originally posted by MaryPoppins
              I'd still not breastfeed a nazi
              Originally posted by vetran
              Urine is quite nourishing

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by ladymuck View Post

                Well I solved philosophy and only killed 70 people in the process.
                I only managed to kill 64.... which surprised me since some of my choices seemed out of sync with the popular options.

                Twas amusing though

                Do what thou wilt

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by d000hg View Post

                  I got bored, do you get a score at the end or a report you can show people?

                  There are some weird results in there but also fairly obviously a lot of people clearly mucking about (the Amazon parcel one).
                  I noticed everyone was doing (generally) the right thing at the beginning but the morals started slipping when their friends and relatives started appearing
                  'CUK forum personality of 2011 - Winner - Yes really!!!!

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by northernladuk View Post

                    I noticed everyone was doing (generally) the right thing at the beginning but the morals started slipping when their friends and relatives started appearing
                    What IS the right thing?
                    The one about the 5 people who tied themselves to the lines was quite informative. Maybe swayed by the recent insulate britain idiots.
                    Originally posted by MaryPoppins
                    I'd still not breastfeed a nazi
                    Originally posted by vetran
                    Urine is quite nourishing

                    Comment

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