Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCXXXIX

Grey day, but still too hot!

Wish you south-eastern and European types would stop hogging all the thunderstorms.

A Family's Lost Love Letters, a Stranger, and a History Revealed - ”The story of my mother’s family is built on dark secrets and tragic losses—suicide, sudden death and fatherless children—yet there was always a treasured relic that transcended the pain: the many love letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother when he was fighting in World War II, the letters that won her heart and her hand… It is a stirring, romantic and optimistic story, but it too is tinged with tragedy. My grandmother, in a desperate attempt to slough off yet one more loss in her life, confessed to us she had destroyed Charlie’s letters.” Abigail Jones tells a family story spanning seventy years.
History of Lossless Data Compression Algorithms - Sounds like dry stuff, but it’s actually rather interesting, involving multiple legal disputes over patents, and personal tragedy: ”Sadly, Phil Katz did not live long enough to see his DEFLATE algorithm take over the computing world. He suffered from alcoholism for several years and his life began to fall apart in the late 1990s, having been arrested several times for drunk driving and other violations. Katz was found dead in a hotel room on April 14, 2000, at the age of 37.”
A Fleet of Taxis Did Not Really Save Paris From the Germans During World War I - "On the night of September 6, 1914, as the fate of France was hanging in the balance, a fleet of taxis drove under cover of darkness from Paris to the front lines of what would become known as the Battle of the Marne. Carrying reinforcements that turned the tide of battle against the Germans, the taxi drivers saved the city and demonstrated the sacred unity of the French people… At least, that’s the story." John Hanc uncovers the rather less exciting, but nonetheless surprising, truth behind the legend.
Joe Swanberg Talks Jake Kasdan’s Sex Tape - A scathing dissection of the multiple technological holes in the plot of what sounds like a pretty crummy film: ”Sex Tape, as is, should really take place in 1987, when the Jay character has just purchased a fancy new home video camera to record his son’s championship baseball game. With a bit of spark missing from their relationship, Jay and his wife Annie (Cameron Diaz) use this new video camera to record themselves having sex. Then Jay accidentally makes copies of the sex tape, instead of the championship baseball game, and he and Annie must retrieve these 10 VHS tapes from friends and family before anyone watches them… Once you invoke the iPad and the Internet you open a Pandora’s Box of problems for narrative storytelling, and the people behind Sex Tape just aren’t up to the task of dealing with these problems.”
1966: Pictures of Soho - "On March 15 1966, and keeping the Hollies and Nancy Sinatra from the top spot, the Walker Brothers were number one with the pop masterpiece The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore). The front pages of the newspapers were all about Mohamed Yusuf Daar who had become the first ‘coloured’ policeman in Britain when he joined the Coventry police force, earning £800 per year (about £13,000 in today’s money) for the privilege. The other main story the papers covered was about the Conservative party leader Edward Heath who had let it be known that he could do business with de Gaulle and that it would be Tory policy to join the Common Market. On this day someone, for some reason, walked around Soho and took some pictures, and here they are.”
How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors - Maarten van Emden on a long-forgotten controversy in Computer Science and the definition of Algol: ”There were plenty of reasons to be opposed. It was not clear whether it could be implemented: a flaky academic experiment like the Lisp interpreter was not an encouraging example for the solid, efficient compiler that the German faction of the committee had in mind. But committee members Naur and van Wijngaarden agreed with McCarthy that recursion was just too tempting an opportunity to be missed… Several committee members had been tricked into approving a final version of the report that included an easily overlooked late addition that settled the controversy in the direction opposite to their wish. Committee member F.L. Bauer registered his protest by characterizing the addition of recursion to the language as an “Amsterdam plot”.”
Meet The Lady Who’s Walked Every Street In Central London - Noelle Poulson will have finished her mission last Friday, although she’s probably still hungover from the celebratory party as she hasn’t updated her blog yet: find the beginning of her trek on her blog Congestion Zone, back in 2012, at Day 1: ”I DO mean EVERY ROAD! When I came across the first tiny little alley that I could actually just see down, I thought, “Hmmmmm, so what’s the rule here? If I can see down the entire length of the road, does that count? Do I walk down it as well? I figured “walk all the streets of Central London” means I must. If I had cheated, I wouldn’t have found START written in the pavement for the picture above, and then where would we be??? The fact is, you can’t see everything by only peering down the street. Too many gems are hidden from view. You gotta walk it. So walk it I will!” (Not to be confused with Walking London one postcode at a time, which featured in Monday Links last September.)
Maniac Mansion Design Notes - "While cleaning out my storage unit in Seattle, I came across a treasure trove of original documents and backup disks from the early days of Lucasfilm Games and Humongous Entertainment. I hadn't been to the unit in over 10 years and had no idea what was waiting for me." Some hidden treasure from Grumpy Gamer, aka Ron Gilbert.
My Right Breast: One Man’s Tale Of Lump And Mammogram - Cautionary tale from B. D. Colen: ”But what was it? And what was I worried about? After all, I’m a man, and men don’t…Well, yes, men do get breast cancer. In fact about one in every thousand men will develop breast cancer during their lifetimes. Granted, that’s barely worth mentioning compared to a woman’s one-in-nine chances, but it still means that the possibility was indeed real that something ugly and malignant was barely hiding beneath my skin.”
Samuel Beckett Motivational Cat Posters - modernist motivation + cats: