Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCXII

[NickFitz]

I wonder if the Girl Guides have a new badge for "wasting time on the Internet"? If so, this lot will give you a head start

• The Hideaway - ”Two long, tall barracks came into view, mirror images of each other. The severe silhouettes, matching blocks of Soviet Lego, were softened by shades of lush green all around. I stepped out of the car and inhaled the sharp scent of fresh pine… As the sun grazed the treetops against a cotton candy sky, I thought that if this was a doomsday survivalist’s paradise, it seemed more paradise than doomsday.” Michaela Cavanagh visits a British climate doomer and his followers in an abandoned military base in Germany.
• A New Geometry for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity - Step aside, Pythagoras: ”A team of mathematicians based in Vienna is developing tools to extend the scope of general relativity.”
• Germany’s Stonehenge? - ”Investigating the hinterland of a timber henge in Germany has revealed a remarkable prehistoric landscape. Franziska Knoll shares the findings from an intriguing concentration of ritual monuments and settlement.” Worth a visit if you're anywhere near Magdeburg
• Your Smartwatch's Heart Rate Monitor Was Developed by a Furry - ”Dr. David Benaron is an inventor whose team at Stanford laid the groundwork for the optical heart rate monitor. He's also a cheetah named Spottacus.” Sadly, Dr. Benaron aka Spottacus died last Friday
• Travelling Turtle - HT to WTFH for suggesting the YouTube channel of Jo Kibble, a civil servant from London who sets himself various challenges involving public transport, accompanied by his crochet turtle: ”I occasionally do silly travelling adventures across the UK and Europe, chronicle them on social media, and then turn them into videos… The Daily Mail once called me 'Twitter's answer to Phileas Fogg.' I didn't know Twitter needed an answer to Phileas Fogg.” (He's now on BlueSky: @politicanimal.bsky.social) This is his recent attempt to get from London to another continent in 24 hours
  
  
• In which I review some pianos - Concert pianist Sharon Su on some pianos she met recently: ”I’m always tired now and I barely have time to keep my own life together, much less write a review of every piano I encounter, but you know what? I befriended a bunch of pianos in June and I want to write about them.”
• Get the location of the ISS using DNS - Terence Eden finds an unusual application for the global distributed database of domain names: ”The snappily titled RFC 1876 is an experimental standard. It allows you to create a DNS record which specifies the latitude and longitude of your server. Of course, some data-centres are very tall and some are underground. So it also contains an altitude parameter… The maximum altitude is 42,849,672 metres which is high enough to allow it to be used on satellites in geostationary orbit.”
• Inside Project Blue Peacock, The Most Outrageous Nuclear Plot Of The Entire Cold War - British ingenuity at work: ”The plan: bury nuclear landmines across West Germany that would explode if the Soviets tried to invade. The problem: frigid temperatures might keep the bombs from detonating. The solution: seal live chickens inside the buried landmines to keep them warm.”
• I Built The Torment Nexus (Political Podcast Edition) - Further proof that so-called "AI" was a terrible mistake: ”Six years ago cartoonist Zach Weinersmith made a joke about a 24/7 AI podcast endlessly talking about polling numbers. I've made it a reality.”
• The photographic history of Light Therapy, 1900-1950 - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this gallery of images about a (mostly?) defunct medical treatment: ”From the late 1800s, light therapy – sometimes called phototherapy – became a key part of certain treatment regimes for tuberculosis, notably tuberculosis of the bones, joints and skin, as prolonged exposure to sunlight can kill the bacteria which cause the disease… As sunlight is not available at all times, artificial alternatives were developed that could mimic the Sun’s beneficial effects. The Finsen lamp, invented by Danish Faroese physician Niels Ryberg Finsen, is perhaps the best-known example.” This piglet was treated by the Ilford PDSA in 1938
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[DoctorStrangelove]

Sunray therapy went on after 1950 of course: it was still ongoing in the early 60s.

Shame about the skin cancers, ozone poisoing, and all that. <- need goggles to protect those: everything looks green until you take them off, then everything looks pink.

You just can't beat a nice chicken bomb, especially with added Cobalt Thorium G for that added ooooomph. .

The Hideaway: obviously thinks we're well on the way to "The Second Sleep". . Wot? No baked beans & shotguns? Well I never did. .

[Uncle Albert]

How d'ya like your eggs in the morning?

I like mine with a bang!