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Previously on "Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. CCLXXXII"
Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. CCLXXXII
Good thing it's a Bank Holiday, as you'll need plenty of time to get through this week's bumper crop
New Mexico Law Review - Sounds a little dry, no? But wait: ”Welcome to the second issue of Volume 45 of the New Mexico Law Review. On behalf of the editorial board and staff, it is my privilege to present our 2015 Special Edition dedicated to the intersection of the critically acclaimed television series Breaking Bad and the law… As the only academic journal in the State of New Mexico dedicated to general legal analysis, we are proud to present this Special Edition highlighting the legal issues addressed in a television series that is arguably New Mexico’s largest contribution to pop culture since the Roswell UFO incident.” As they don’t seem to have worked out how to make a per-issue index page, and all the actual papers are PDF files, I’ll take the unusual step of reproducing the table of contents here:
A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open - Jason Scott of the Internet Archive on a new collection of cracked Apple II software, all including full details of how their original copy protection was cracked: ”What 4AM has been doing for the past year or so is re-cracking long-dormant Apple II programs with a new goal – to educate and to preserve. This has produced hundreds of new insights into Apple II history, some of which are seeing the light of day for the first time. This weekend, I’ve now made the vast majority of 4am’s cracked programs playable at the Internet Archive. Some of these disks have never, as far as can be determined, been imaged or copied before in any meaningful way. (Primarily educational programs.) They are rare specimens.”
All set for chemistry - "Chemistry sets through the years have both weathered and reflected many changes in science and society, as Philip Ball discovers.” I had one of those Thomas Salter ones, with "Chemistry" in big, bold Helvetica, white on a cyan background
This Is What Happens When You Use Rat Poison: Flymageddon - Erika Engelhaupt on the perils of amateur pest control: ”I killed the rats in my basement ceiling. At the time, they were my biggest problem. Then I found myself in my car one night with the headlights aimed at my back door, hoping to lure a swarm of carrion flies out of the house. Carrion flies, if you’re not familiar, are the kind that lay their eggs on dead things. So then that was my biggest problem.”
The Spoil of Mariners - Colin Dickey on the unpleasant history of scurvy: ”Vitamin C is necessary for the hydroxylation of proline and lysine, and without these collagen can no longer form. Collagen, in turn, is necessary to keep your body together, and as scurvy advances joint pain and swelling accompany wounds that do not heal or even re-open and begin to bleed again. (Trapped in the Arctic in 1832, explorer John Ross began to bleed from wounds he’d received decades earlier in the Napoleonic Wars.)”
Inside a $34 smartphone (Part I), $34 smartphone Part II – Teardown - Angus Gratton explores one of the innumerable cheap phones now produced in China: ”This Huami H3 smartphone cost me $34US (210RMB) in January. It’s sold with a 5 inch screen, Bluetooth, WiFi, 4G cell connectivity, Android 4.4 and an 8 core processor… “8 cores” was a con job. The About page was modded and a custom visualisation added to suggest a much faster processor with more cores. Sneaky!”
The (four-letter) C word - "It’s one of the few words in the English language that still has the power to shock. But why? Grab a cuppa and savour Sadie Hasler’s brilliant defence of a good ****. Warning: contains the word ****." Judging by those asterisks, Sadie's views hold no sway with CUK
A Handful Of Bronze-Age Men Could Have Fathered Two Thirds Of Europeans - "Europe has surprisingly little genetic variety. Learning how and when the modern gene-pool came together has been a long journey. But thanks to new technological advances a picture is slowly coming together of repeated colonization by peoples from the east with more efficient lifestyles." A bit like Polish plumbers, then
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