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Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCLXXXII

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCLXXXII

    Despite the sun it's cold out, but it's always nice and warm in the Internet
    • The First Family of Human Cannonballing - ”David and Jeannie Smith gave up their day jobs for a life of daredevil stunts —with six children in tow. Five decades, thousands of cannon shots and multiple Guinness World Records later, this stupendous family business is still defying gravity and all other expectations.” Plan B, anyone?
    • The Search for Extraterrestrial Life as We Don’t Know It - Sarah Scoles on the scientists searching for alien life that's wholly unlike the stuff we have here: ”As an astronomy postdoc at Harvard University in the late 2000s and early 2010s she investigated how astronomers might use genetic sequencing—detecting and identifying DNA and RNA—to find evidence of aliens… What if extraterrestrial life didn’t have DNA or RNA or other nucleic acids? What if their cells got instructions in some other biochemical way?”
    • Finally, a Fast Algorithm for Shortest Paths on Negative Graphs - ”Researchers can now find the shortest route through a network nearly as fast as theoretically possible, even when some steps can cancel out others.” Move over, Dijkstra
    • how to completely own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way - Infosec researcher maia arson crimew explains how she ended up getting a copy of the secret TSA data from an exposed server: ”like so many other of my hacks this story starts with me being bored and browsing shodan (or well, technically zoomeye, chinese shodan), looking for exposed jenkins servers that may contain some interesting goods. at this point i've probably clicked through about 20 boring exposed servers with very little of any interest, when i suddenly start seeing some familar words. ‘ACARS’, lots of mentions of ‘crew’ and so on. lots of words i've heard before, most likely while binge watching Mentour Pilot YouTube videos. jackpot.” I also love the pure 1990s aesthetic of this blog. It even has a webring link in the footer!
    • The Lisa: Apple's Most Influential Failure - ”Happy 40th Birthday to Lisa! The Apple Lisa computer, that is. In celebration of this milestone, CHM has received permission from Apple to release the source code to the Lisa software, including its system and applications software.” The code is written in Apple’s Clascal, a precursor of Object Pascal. Ars Technica also has a writeup to mark the anniversary: Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on
    • Solving grammar’s greatest puzzle - ”A grammatical problem which has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th Century BC has finally been solved by an Indian PhD student at the University of Cambridge.” At last, you can talk in Sanksrit without embarrassing yourself
    • Downward Spiral - Kate Evans on the nautilus, the ancient spiral sea creature: ”Nautiluses have certainly always been survivors. Ancient and cunning, their lineage was adaptable enough to persist through all five of Earth’s major past extinction events. Their ancestors, the nautiloids, appeared half a billion years ago… They soon evolved the coiled spiral with interconnected internal chambers seen in nautiluses today. In their current incarnation, they’ve cruised the oceans for at least 100 million years. It was in this shape that they weathered the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaurs.”
    • A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip, A history of ARM, part 2: Everything starts to come together, A history of ARM, part 3: Coming full circle - The full story of the chip that took over the world - well, a lot of the world: ”As the 20th century came to a close, ARM was on the precipice of massive change. Under its first CEO, Robin Saxby, the company had grown from 12 engineers in a barn to hundreds of employees and was the preferred choice in RISC chips for the rapidly expanding mobile market. But the mobile and computer worlds were starting to merge, and the titans of the latter industry were not planning to surrender to the upstarts of the former.”
    • Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight - Ken Shirriff is on the cogs and gears again: ”The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus, which used a rotating globe to indicate the spacecraft's position above the Earth. This navigation instrument was an electromechanical analog computer that used an elaborate system of gears, cams, and differentials to compute the spacecraft's position… We recently received a Globus from a collector and opened it up for repair and reverse engineering. In this blog post, I explain how it operated, show its internal mechanisms, and describe what I've learned so far from reverse engineering.”
    • The Migraine Art Competition Collection - ”The British Migraine Association ran a series of migraine art competitions in the 1980s with the intention to share people’s varied experiences of migraine. In the seven years that the competition ran, the Migraine Art Competition Collection was formed, comprising 545 unique, often striking works of art. Rada Vlatkovic, Collections Information Officer at Wellcome Collection, shares some images from the collection and reflects on her own experience of migraine.” I vaguely remember reading about this at the time This is Family life with aura though the only attribution I can find is “Artist from Scotland”.


    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Migraine with aura. Lovely.

    I recall getting one at work, looked at my watch to see what the time was & couldn't see the watch much less tell the time. Which was disturbing.

    The zigzags are another favourite, looking out of the window & wondering why that roof is covered with zigzaggy tiles. .

    Love the comments in the Arm thing where they spend a shedload of time debating (or mass debating) the price of 1 meg of ram in 1993/4.
    Last edited by DoctorStrangelove; 23 January 2023, 21:03.
    When the fun stops, STOP.

    Comment


      #3
      I get migraine with aura. For me it's like I'm trying to look down a tunnel while under water. That comes after the pins and needles has worked its way up my left arm from the finger tips.

      I am also very light sensitive with any migraine or headache. Fortunately, I am not noise sensitive so I will go to bed with the radio on as the noise works as a distraction (except when The Archers is on). The oils that get sprayed when peeling an orange used to be a massive trigger when I was younger. Just the smell of an orange would set a migraine off. Fortunately I've grown out of that one as I do like an orange - especially in the summer when I've kept them in the fridge to get nice and cold first.

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