Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. XV

[NickFitz]

Some foul lurgy has attacked me , but do they turn the web off while I recover? Of course not. Therefore, the links keep on coming:

• I waterboard! - Straight Dope forum member Scylla wondered if waterboarding constituted torture or not. So, naturally, he waterboarded himself, and shares his conclusions on this thread
  
  
• "Most Dangerous Roads in the World" Series - Brilliant descriptions and photos of lots of places where you don't want to meet a lorry coming the other way.
  
  
• Betraying Salinger - "I scored the publishing coup of the decade: his final book. And then I blew it." How a small publisher almost got the rights to publish J.D.Salinger's Hapworth 16, 1924.
  
  
• A Turing Machine - Yes, a real working Turing Machine! "Although this Turing machine is controlled by a Parallax Propeller microcontroller, its operation while running is based only on a set of state transformations loaded from an SD card and what is written to and read from the tape. While it may seem as if the tape is merely the input and output of the machine, it is not! Nor is the tape just the memory of the machine. In a way the tape is the computer."
  
  
• Charlie the Unicorn - One of my all-time favourite animations. "Charleeee... we're going to Candy Mountain! Come with us, Charleeee..."
  
  
• What Goes On Beneath Leicester Square At 2am? - "What happens in a Tube station when all the passengers have gone home? Why do Tube workers carry cards about rat urine? And why isn't standing on the right of an escalator necessarily a good thing? Londonist finds answers on our latest nocturnal investigation."
  
  
• ‘Tis Pity We Called Her A Whore – And Other Ineffectual Digital Apologies - "...they intend to take legal action both for the initial error but also for the further harm done by the time the papers took to correct their libellous URLs." If your system generates meaningful URLs, make sure you remove any libellous ones.
  
  
• My Half-Year of Hell With Christian Fundamentalists - "When Polish student Michael Gromek, 19, went to America on a student exchange, he found himself trapped in a host family of Christian fundamentalists. What followed was a six-month hell of dawn church visits and sex education talks as his new family tried to banish the devil from his soul."
  
  
• Calendars and Their History - "According to a recent estimate (Fraser, 1987), there are about forty calendars used in the world today. This chapter is limited to the half-dozen principal calendars in current use." It also contains more than you probably wanted to know about them.
  
  
• How to avoid the exhausting planning and preparation that goes into making a second date - "Dear 37 Year-Old Guy Sitting Next to Me at the Coffee Shop Right Now Who is Clearly on a Blind Date: Forgive me for eavesdropping, but this is rather important... my very basic inter-personal skills tell me that you are making a series of extremely obvious first date errors."

Happy invoicing!

[d000hg]

I'm confused by the waterboarding one. If it genuinely stops you being able to breath, how is it only a simulation of drowning? Or is the idea that you will genuinely pass out, but water will pour out making it quite safe as you just wake up again?

[The Wikir Man]

If Nick is back on the bench - does that mean that new all-singing, all-dancing, all-new CUK is ready???

[NickFitz]

If Nick is back on the bench - does that mean that new all-singing, all-dancing, all-new CUK is ready???

No, just that I forgot to change the title

[Platypus]

Thanks, Nick, some interesting stuff.

[NickFitz]

I'm confused by the waterboarding one. If it genuinely stops you being able to breath, how is it only a simulation of drowning? Or is the idea that you will genuinely pass out, but water will pour out making it quite safe as you just wake up again?

Although the water won't enter your lungs, it will enter your trachea to a sufficient degree to trigger a physical response which will cause the mind to go into a state of blind panic. The key point really is to ensure that the victim doesn't pass out, but is instead kept conscious but in a state of unreasoning terror for as long as the torturer deems necessary. If they pass out, you stop, as keeping them unconscious isn't going to intimidate them.

[darmstadt]

"Anthrax can lie dormant in spore form for centuries, but if disturbed it can spread through the air. When the Metropolitan Line was dug in the mid 19th century, anthrax spores were released, killing several people. The bacteria that causes bubonic plague may also survive, and dealing with ancient remains is an occupational hazard for rail projects in the City."

Think twice now about taking the underground

[expat]

I'm confused by the waterboarding one. If it genuinely stops you being able to breath, how is it only a simulation of drowning? Or is the idea that you will genuinely pass out, but water will pour out making it quite safe as you just wake up again?

I saw a TV programme that interviewed the American serviceman who headed the unit that researches this stuff in order to teach US personnel to resist it (that's what they said, anyway). When the interviewer asked him, about waterboarding, "so you feel like you're dying" he smiled and replied "No. You are dying". I believed him.

[Scrag Meister]

Thanks for your efforts

Interesting eclectic set of articles, just spent an hour reading about unused tube stations and J D Salingers publisher!!