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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDXXIII

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDXXIII

    Early today as I'm about to drive through the frost to my parents' for lunch
    • The Underdog Doctors Who Saved America’s “Blue Babies” - "In 1945, a chain-smoking surgeon, a deaf female doctor, and a self-taught African-American lab tech developed a risky procedure that revolutionized medicine." Thomas Morris on the development in 1944 of a groundbreaking procedure in paediatric heart surgery.

    • Forensic Science Put Jimmy Genrich in Prison for 24 Years. What if It Wasn’t Science? - "A special investigation reveals a disastrous flaw affecting thousands of criminal convictions." The dubious application of "pattern-matching" in forensic science may have led to innumerable miscarriages of justice.

    • A Brief Guide To London's Arches And Gates - Getting your Marble Arch and your Wellington Arch mixed up? Londonist has you covered: "Late Georgian Britain had emerged as the dominant power in the world in trade, industry and arms and was feeling proud and confident. This was particularly reflected in art and architecture, manifesting itself in neo-Classical styles, grandees having bizarre statues of themselves dressed as imperial Roman generals, and also these triumphal arches."

    • How secure are your light bulbs? - Owen Williams debugs his lights: "While Philips Hue is a great system, the security model it uses is... weird at best, and I found out in the most confusing way: I lost control of my lights."

    • Venus Spokes: An Explanation at Last? - "Percival Lowell's name is synonymous with canals on Mars and the discovery of Pluto… about a century ago Lowell also made some infamous observations of Venus." Turns out he was looking at his own eyes.

    • The Grim History Hidden Under a Baltimore Parking Lot - "After an African-American cemetery was bulldozed, families wondered what happened to the graves." The fact that these were African-American remains should be a clue that, in the 1960s, they weren't treated with the greatest of respect, as Sarah Laskow reveals.

    • Physics cheats - Games programmers have been conning you with shonky physics simulations for years and now Eevee reveals all, including strange things discovered from a deep dive into the Doom source code: "Okay, let’s try Doom. In Doom, the default friction is 90.625%. Hang on, what? Yes, in Doom, friction is a multiplier applied every tic. Doom runs at 35 tics per second, so this is a multiplier of 0.032 per second. Yikes!"

    • Parking for Gold - "Competitive parking may not inspire the popular imagination like NASCAR or the NBA, but a handful of enthusiasts are hoping to change that. Welcome to the National Valet Olympics." Geoff Manaugh meets the Titans of the valet parking world as they battle for glory.

    • After Hours - Linda Besner on the growing movement to do things when others don't: "Taken at its most individualistic, it can seem that the idea of off-peaking is not to free everyone from the bonds of inefficency, but to position oneself to take advantage of the unthinking conformity of others… a matter of identifying an arbitrage opportunity created by the system’s lack of self-awareness."

    • Bad Bandstands - Paul A. Rabbitts is on a mission to sort out this country's growing bandstand problem: "So what makes a bad bandstand? My love for them is undoubted I hope. But there are bad ones out there… The purpose of this page is to name and shame those responsible and hopefully they will actually do something about it." This one's in Bristol:



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Wow someone has a love of bandstands

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by saptastic View Post
      Wow someone has a love of bandstands
      If there's one thing the World Wide Web has taught us, it's that for literally any topic under the sun there is at least one person passionately interested in it

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
        If there's one thing the World Wide Web has taught us, it's that for literally any topic under the sun there is at least one person passionately interested in it
        And that, when it comes to porn, there are people catering for that person too.

        Comment

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