Monday Links from the Barnyard vol. CCXXIV

[NickFitz]

Bit late today - ClientCo were having a company meeting. They have these at the end of the office, right next to my desk, so I have to look interested. IR35 pointer?

• Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy’s Mysterious Genius - "Lehrer had been a sensation in the late 1950s, the era’s musical nerd god: a wryly confident Harvard-educated math prodigy who turned his bone-dry wit to satirical musical comedy. His sound looked further back, to Broadway of the ‘20s and ‘30s — a man and a piano, crisp and clever — but his lyrics were funny and sharp to the point of drawing blood, and sometimes appalling." Retrospective on the best mathematician ever to sell more than two million records, who was 86 last week
  
  
• The Rip-offs & Making Our Original Game - The puzzle game Threes was released to popular acclaim in February, but soon clones, such as 1024 and 2048, appeared. The creators of Threes seek to show that the clones fail to reach the standard set by their original game, by disclosing fourteen months of emails showing the work they did. Spoiler for those who like 2048: they demonstrate a technique for achieving excellent scores on it, by repeating the same two moves over and over, and a third when both of them are blocked. (Threes is not susceptible to such easy wins, perhaps because of the fourteen months of work put in.)
  
  
• The Big Fish - "The story of suck.com, the first great website."
  
  
• Expressing your love. - "Brighton, Wednesday, November 5th 1845. A crisis was breaking. Lady Adela Villiers, the seventeen year old daughter of the Earl and Countess of Jersey had disappeared... Further inquiries at the railway station suggested a man, who had been holding a handkerchief against his face had bought tickets to London for himself and a woman who answered Lady Adela’s description." Interesting look at how the advent of the railways made eloping to Gretna Green a much easier proposition than it had been in the days of the stagecoach.
  
  
• Transcribing Piano Rolls, the Pythonic Way - "In this post I use Fourier transforms to revive a forgotten Gershwin piano piece." Brilliant technique for using freely-available Python libraries to analyse a YouTube video of a player-piano showing the roll roll by, recover the tune it's playing by visual analysis, then output that as a musical score
  
  
• What I Would Do If I Ran Tarsnap - "Tarsnap is the world’s best secure online backup service. It’s run by Colin Percival, Security Officer Emeritus at FreeBSD, a truly gifted cryptographer and programmer... Colin is not a great engineer who is bad at business and thus compromising the financial rewards he could get from running his software company. No, Colin is in fact a great engineer who is so bad at business that it actively is compromising his engineering objectives." Excellent case study about improving a SaaS business by Patrick McKenzie, offering much food for thought if your plan B is of such a kind.
  
  
• Post-operative check - "It’s okay that you don’t remember me. My name is Shara, and I’m part of the surgical team. I’m checking to see how you’re doing after your surgery." Not well, is how
  
  
• Mum, Dad, what did you do when you were children? - "Once upon a time, kids had all the freedom in the world. Parents were not the hovering, child-centred neurotics they are today. You could scale a slag heap in your Clark's for six hours and nobody would even notice you were gone. Playing with broken glass, red-hot pokers and car batteries? No problem... But were our technology-free childhoods really as golden as we remember? Was it really all scrumping for apples and endless summer days? Or should we be thanking the Lord for iPads, CBeebies, locked doors and curfews?"
  
  
• The Remarkable Self-Organization of Ants - "Scientists have been studying the social behavior of ants and other insects for decades, searching for chemical cues and other signals that the insects use to coordinate behavior... But new research combining observations of ant behavior with modern imaging techniques and computational modeling is beginning to reveal the secrets of ant construction. It turns out that ants perform these complex tasks by obeying a few simple rules." A better understanding of how ants achieve complexity could have benefits in robotics and even medicine.
  
  
• Bollards of London - "Welcome to bollards of London (incorporating bollards of Britain), a site dedicated to those rather odd looking pavement objects you find in the most interesting of places." Load of bollards:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[xoggoth]

Good stuff. Re what did you do when you were children? I used to love digging holes. I still have a burning ambition to dig a huge cave in my garden where I can escape from the world but can't think where to put the soil. Staring at Horsetail was good too.

[Mich the Tester]

Building jump ramps at the bottom of a hill, falling off the end of them on a Raleigh Boxer and then trying to lift the damn thing off myself afterwards. Then along came a similar looking but rather lighter thingy called a BMX, which was a lot less crap.

[mudskipper]

Came across this Bollard in Sydney sporting the largest stick insect I've ever seen.

[OwlHoot]

[*]Mum, Dad, what did you do when you were children? - "Once upon a time, kids had all the freedom in the world. Parents were not the hovering, child-centred neurotics they are today. You could scale a slag heap in your Clark's for six hours and nobody would even notice you were gone. Playing with broken glass, red-hot pokers and car batteries? No problem... But were our technology-free childhoods really as golden as we remember? Was it really all scrumping for apples and endless summer days? Or should we be thanking the Lord for iPads, CBeebies, locked doors and curfews?"

From that article:

We had fields and woods and the streets to run around in, we fell, took risks and did a lot of stupid stuff. Kids don't have that freedom, they are forever under an adult gaze, which I think makes them less likely to be inventive.

very valid point, which advocates of packing kids off to infant school at 2 should bear in mind.

[eek]

I'll add this here as its not really worth a thread by itself

Why December has 31 days and February has 28

[OwlHoot]

Good stuff. Re what did you do when you were children? I used to love digging holes.

Me too! When I was about five I spent days and days digging a huge hole in a flowerbed at the end of the garden. Must have been a good six feet deep.

Despite the sandy soil, I don't think my parents were too bothered about it all collapsing on top of me, just relieved I had found something absorbing to keep myself busy and not bothering them.

I still have a burning ambition to dig a huge cave in my garden where I can escape from the world but can't think where to put the soil.

Surely you've seen The Great Escape. Just sew a couple of sacks in the legs of your trousers, head down to the local park each day, and while nonchalantly whistling pull the strings and discretely shuffle the released soil piles flat.

[DaveB]

From that article:



very valid point, which advocates of packing kids off to infant school at 2 should bear in mind.

WHS +1

We discovered welding (sort of) using a car battery, wire coat hanger and tin foil plates.
Built a working ballista from old railway sleepers and lorry springs.
Spent endless days roaming the country side on foot or by bike exploring and generally going places we probably shouldn't have done like old quarries and tin mines.

And that was before we discovered cider and girls!*




*I grew up in Cornwall.

[Sysman]

Building jump ramps at the bottom of a hill, falling off the end of them on a Raleigh Boxer and then trying to lift the damn thing off myself afterwards. Then along came a similar looking but rather lighter thingy called a BMX, which was a lot less crap.

We didn't have Boxer or BMX bikes in my day but that didn't stop us building ramps to leap off. See saws and bridges made out of planks too.

Then there was a building site nearby. Endless hours of fun building our own dens out of bricks and planks. One of them (built by the older lads) even had a chimney. Yes, lots of playing with matches, candles and lighting fires.

The fireworks and other explosives came later :

[Flashman]

Good to see Tom Lehrer is still going. The element song notably re-used in that episode of the Big bang Theory.