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Monday Links from the Easter Bunny's Secret Underground Lair vol. CDXXXI

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    Monday Links from the Easter Bunny's Secret Underground Lair vol. CDXXXI

    If you've managed to survive the long weekend with your family up to this point, you've definitely earned some time reading gubbins on the Internet
    • This Is How They Saved Me - Neda Semnani and her family escaped Iran in 1982 after her father was arrested: "It was 3 a.m. when the smugglers led us to a barn where we could rest for the night. Someone had laid out five mattresses for us on the barn floor. The men slept on the floor at our feet. In the morning, they brought us cups of dirty tea, bowls of yogurt and hot oil and a plate of bread… Throughout the afternoon, the men came and went, speaking to each other as if we weren’t there, their voices low and guttural. They were trying to figure out how to get more funds from us before we had to leave that night."

    • How Railway Surgeons Advanced Medicine - "For rail workers and passengers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, train travel — while miraculous for the speed with which it carried people across vast distances — presented ghastly dangers. Brakemen commonly lost hands and fingers in the hazardous coupling of cars. Exploding boilers released high-pressure steam that scalded stokers. Passengers were maimed or crushed when trains jumped the tracks, or telescoped into tangles of wreckage." The modern commuter might argue that things haven't changed much, but at least back then they had doctors who specialised in treating railway-related injuries.

    • This spacecraft will get closer to the Sun than any before it—without melting - "This summer, NASA will launch the Parker Solar Probe, an impressively heat-resistant spacecraft destined to glide closer to the surface of the Sun than any spacecraft before it. It will fly within about 6 million kilometers of the searing surface, more than seven times closer than earlier craft. "

    • Chloroform: How the 'Knockout Drug' Has Been Used to Murder Over the Last 25 Years - Idiot murderers have apparently been reading too many Victorian stories: "Chloroform has been featured in crime fiction since the 19th century, but in those pulpy publications it’s erroneously presented as an instantaneous ‘knockout drug,’ often applied via soaked rag in an alleyway ambush. In reality, chloroform-induced sedation requires careful and continuous dosing… although rarely used for murder, chloroform is nonetheless dangerous and was historically responsible for hundreds of deaths due to misapplication."

    • 87-Year-Old Grandma Uses Microsoft Paint In A Way That Would Probably Surprise Even Its Developers - another person who uses Paint because they probably aren’t even aware that Photoshop exists: ”87-year-old Concha Garcia Zaera enjoys a hobby that’s rather unusually among her friends. She draws. Using only MS Paint. She discovered the program after her children gave her a computer, and she hasn’t looked back ever since… ‘I began painting little things: first, a house, the next day I’d add a mountain… Step by step, I was adding details, and in the end, the result was a very pretty thing.’”


    • The Tragic Story Behind The Man Who Helped Create Tetris - "Chances are, you know the name Alexey Pajitnov. Arguably the most famous game designer to come out of Russia, he gave the world Tetris, which is regularly referred to as one of the greatest video games of all time. However, the name Vladimir Pokhilko might be less familiar - despite the fact that he is often credited as co-creating the game alongside Pajitnov, and would later work with him on other video games."

    • The Man Who Made Violins Out of New York City Buildings - Samuel Stochek taught himself how to make violins using materials scavenged from New York demolition sites: ”Though his sources were unorthodox, his success was undeniable. Stochek’s floorboard violins were played in Carnegie Hall by the world’s most famous violinists.”

    • Prince of Persia - Jordan Mechner’s classic Apple II game has finally been ported to the BBC Master: ”After the original Apple II 6502 source code was recovered and uploaded to GitHub by the author Jordan Mechner, I decided to take it upon myself to port this to the BBC Master computer, given that it shares the same 6502 CPU and 128K RAM. That was the theory at least. And this being the future, you can play it in an emulator in your web browser

    • How infighting turns toxic for chimpanzees - "Power. Ambition. Jealousy. According to a new study, the same things that fuel deadly clashes in humans can also tear apart chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives. In the early 1970s, primatologist Jane Goodall and colleagues studying chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, watched as a once-unified chimp community disintegrated into two rival factions. What followed was a period of killings and land grabs, the only civil war ever observed in wild chimpanzees. It’s always the same when the family gets together at Easter

    • Krzysztof Skórczewski – Ruins of the mind - "When he first graduated from the Printmaking Department in 1971, he was interested in linocut and graphic design. But, in 1976, while studying at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, he became interested in copperplate engraving. Since then, he has created over 210 copperplate engravings.”



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post

    This spacecraft will get closer to the Sun than any before it—without melting - "This summer, NASA will launch the Parker Solar Probe, an impressively heat-resistant spacecraft destined to glide closer to the surface of the Sun than any spacecraft before it. It will fly within about 6 million kilometers of the searing surface, more than seven times closer than earlier craft. "
    The Irish space agency were going to do that years ago. To overcome the problem of the heat, they were going to send it at night.

    …Maybe we ain’t that young anymore

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by NickFitz View Post

      Chloroform: How the 'Knockout Drug' Has Been Used to Murder Over the Last 25 Years - Idiot murderers have apparently been reading too many Victorian stories: "Chloroform has been featured in crime fiction since the 19th century, but in those pulpy publications it’s erroneously presented as an instantaneous ‘knockout drug,’ often applied via soaked rag in an alleyway ambush. In reality, chloroform-induced sedation requires careful and continuous dosing… although rarely used for murder, chloroform is nonetheless dangerous and was historically responsible for hundreds of deaths due to misapplication."

      Does this hanky smell of chloroform to you?

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by WTFH View Post
        The Irish space agency were going to do that years ago. To overcome the problem of the heat, they were going to send it at night.

        Quality post and so few upvotes, bejesus.

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by WTFH View Post
          The Irish space agency were going to do that years ago. To overcome the problem of the heat, they were going to send it at night.

          You are Bernard Manning and ICMFP.
          "Being nice costs nothing and sometimes gets you extra bacon" - Pondlife.

          Comment

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