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Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCLXXXV

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    Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCLXXXV

    Back to the fray with ClientGov now, but there's still time for the important things (importance not guaranteed)
    • Crushed. - The perils of social media fame: ”When Johna Ramirez’s son joined a wildly popular circle of tween YouTube influencers, it seemed like he was fulfilling his Hollywood dreams. But in the Squad, fame and fortune came at a cost.”
    • Finding a Whale in a Watery Haystack - ”The pandemic forced all sorts of people to bring their jobs home with them. For Cortney Watt, an ecologist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, that meant building six fake belugas in her garage. It was a strange project with an even stranger purpose: to see if she could see the whales from space.” Bet you wish your job involved building whales
    • Mathematicians Complete Quest to Build ‘Spherical Cubes’ - ”Is it possible to fill space “cubically” with shapes that act like spheres? A proof at the intersection of geometry and theoretical computer science says yes.” Odd stuff, geometry
    • Explore the In Our Time archive - ”In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 since 1998… There are almost a thousand episodes (974 listed here), on all kinds of topics, and they are all available to listen to on the BBC website. This unofficial site is about finding what to listen to next.” The really cool thing about this is the directory section, in which the topics that have been covered are arranged by the Dewey Decimal System, making any given subject easy to find (if you remember how to use a library)
    • The U.S. effort to arm Ukraine starts in Scranton, Pennsylvania - ”You can still see the old train tracks along the factory floor of the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, an echo of the days when the workers at this cavernous 115-year-old building used to assemble steam locomotives… The army took over the factory in 1953, and ever since, it’s been used to produce unguided artillery ammunition: a product that in recent years was starting to look almost as antiquated as the steam engine.” Now old factories are working flat-out to meet Ukraine's need for shells.
    • FindThatMeme - Finally, you can work out what on earth those pesky kids are going on about: ”Search millions of memes from across the web in seconds. You can search by text in the meme, or by providing a meme you want to find similar memes to.”
    • Build a Cuckoo Clock From Scratch - Sawdust Willy inherited a broken cuckoo clock: ”When I first took the clock apart I took stock of what all was there and found that there were several missing or badly deteriorated pieces so I needed to locate a source for parts… Along with all the other parts that I had ordered I also decided to purchase one of the movements. I wanted to get the old movement working again but I thought if it just won't run I could replace it with a new movement. At least that's what I told myself to rationalize buying the new movement. But the truth is the more I worked on and learned about these clocks the more I became fascinated with them... and I decided that I really wanted to build one from scratch. So here we are.”
    • Archimedes Live - ”…is a project by Paul Stone which allows anyone to try out an emulated Acorn Archimedes computer in their web browser. The Archimedes, first released in 1987, was Acorn's 32-bit successor to the BBC Micro. Acorn also created the ARM2 processor at the heart of the Archimedes - the ancestor of the ARM chips that power billions of smartphones, computers and other devices around the world today.” I wrote stuff on the Archimedes for a small educational software company in the 1990s, and it's a great machine. But you might have to get used to the concept of a three-button mouse
    • Silicon reverse-engineering: the Intel 8086 processor's flag circuitry - Meanwhile, back in the world of CISC, Ken Shirriff continues his exploration of the 8086: ”Status flags are a key part of most processors, indicating if an arithmetic result is negative, zero, or has a carry, for instance. In this post, I take a close look at the flag circuitry in the Intel 8086 processor (1978), the chip that launched the PC revolution.1 Looking at the silicon die of the 8086 reveals how its flags are implemented. The 8086's flag circuitry is surprisingly complicated, full of corner cases and special handling. Moreover, I found an undocumented zero register that is used by the microcode.”
    • The Complete Photographs of Darwin by John van Wyhe - Need a photograph of Charles Darwin? Look no further: ”This is by far the most complete and accurate catalogue of photographs of Darwin ever published. It includes a dozen discovered during the many years of research for this study. The list includes more details about each photograph than previously published, such as dates, prices, the photographers and comments by Darwin or others on how the photographs were originally received.” This one was taken by Emery Walker in 1855


    Happy invoicing!

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