Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCXCIV

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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCXCIV

No offence to ExClientCorp, but the bench is vastly preferable in almost all respects

GCHQ and Me: My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers - Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell on forty years of seeking to uncover the truth about government communications interception: ”Behind me, sharp footfalls broke the stillness. A squad was running, hard, toward the porch of the house we had left. Suited men surrounded us. A burly middle-aged cop held up his police ID. We had broken “Section 2″ of Britain’s secrecy law, he claimed. These were “Special Branch,” then the elite security division of the British police… They said we’d be taken to the local police station. But after being forced into cars, we were driven in the wrong direction, toward the center of London. I became uneasy.”
Three Essential Dadaist Films: Groundbreaking Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp - "Are Richter, Man Ray, and Duchamp’s films—in Tzara’s words—“like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers… preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition”? Such hyperbolic expressions only serve to underline what Duchamp’s disks set in motion: progress is an illusion.”
The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever - "A reboot is a delicate thing. When a once-profitable franchise of characters becomes stale, outdated, or overly complex, there will always be voices calling for the slate to be wiped clean: to take the characters back to their basics, retell their origin stories, make them contemporary. But all too often, those rebooting efforts are laughable, pandering failures. Ultimate Marvel was the rare exception." Abraham Riesman on the new approach to their stories that Marvel has now brought to an end.
Ghost hotel 'celebrates' 61 years without guests - "Work began on Italy's Grande Hotel San Calogero more than 60 years ago, but in spite of being renovated and inaugurated twice, the hotel has never entertained a single guest." Quite a comedy of errors and bureaucratic incompetence
In 1975, this Kodak employee invented the digital camera. His bosses made him hide it. - Steven Sasson by name: ”Soon after arriving at Kodak, Mr. Sasson was given a seemingly unimportant task — to see whether there was any practical use for a charged coupled device (C.C.D.), which had been invented a few years earlier. “Hardly anybody knew I was working on this, because it wasn’t that big of a project,” Mr. Sasson said “It wasn’t secret. It was just a project to keep me from getting into trouble doing something else, I guess.”"
Interesting Patterns on Flightradar24 - Explanations of the many strange flight paths to be seen on apps like Flightradar: ”Users will post a screenshot to our Facebook or Twitter pages and wonder why they’re seeing a particular flight path. While we don’t necessarily have specific information for individual flights, there are a few categories under which these flights can be filed.”
Yes, Rats Can Swim Up Your Toilet. And It Gets Worse Than That. - You may remember Erika Engelhaupt’s battle with rats and flies back in May. The repulsive saga continues: ”When my husband, Jay, cut out a section of the bathroom ceiling where Gregg’s endoscope had led us, we found that our rat nest was centered around an old sewer drain pipe that, unbeknownst to us, had been cut but never capped during the removal of an upstairs toilet. Dark oily smudges marked the rim where rats had climbed up from the sewers and dropped into my basement ceiling space… the day after we capped our toilet pipe, a rat popped up in my next-door neighbor’s toilet.”
8 Psychological Tricks of Restaurant Menus - ”A restaurant’s menu is more than just a random list of dishes. It has likely been strategically tailored at the hands of a menu engineer or consultant to ensure it's on-brand, easy to read, and most importantly, profitable.” Damn these infernal tricksters, manipulating us into eating nice food!
Drunk History: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of All-American Whiskey - Interview with Noah Rothbaum, who’s written a book on the subject of whiskey packaging: ”For a long time, if you wanted to buy whiskey, you weren’t buying bottles. When you’d go to a liquor store or grocery store, you’d fill up your own jug or flask or decanter… That really changed in 1870, when the first bottled American whiskey came out. It was called Old Forester, and it’s still available today. Old Forester was marketed not at consumers, but at doctors, since they would prescribe whiskey for a range of maladies.”
I’ve Been Putting a Hand-Drawn Picture of a Cat in My Company’s Suggestion Box Every Day for Two Months - Dan O’Brien plays the long game: ”The ultimate end goal of this long con was an email. I was going to put a picture of a cat in our suggestion box every single day until some frustrated administrative employee of the company sent out a company-wide email that said “Whoever keeps putting pictures of cats in the suggestion box, PLEASE STOP.””