Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCXCV

[darmstadt]

[*]We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life - "Once upon a time, in the year 2007, people were really excited about Second Life… Many universities set up their own private islands to engage students; some even held classes within Second Life. Most of these virtual universities are gone –– it costs almost $300 per month to host your own island –– but it turns out a handful remain as ghost towns.” Commenters point out that at least some of these virtual places are actually still used; Patrick Hogan appears to have made the basic error of visiting during the colleges’ summer vacation

I had an account on Second Life! At about that time I was working at IBM R&D and they were ramping up for Social Media and this was a big thing internally. Seems to have died a death, which is okay by me as I could never work it out

[NickFitz]

Unexpected plot twist at the end, caught me totally off guard

Indeed. The American legal system is weird

[Magpie252]

[*]The Trials of Ed Graf - "In 1988, he was convicted of killing his stepsons—based on arson science we now know is bunk. A quarter of a century later, Texas granted him a new trial, one that pitted modern forensics against old-fashioned Texas justice."

Unexpected plot twist at the end, caught me totally off guard

[EternalOptimist]

followed the south African million dollar pigeon race but it was last january
bummer I would like to have seen that

[NickFitz]

Thanks for the links, but look a bit boring this week.

I'm thinking of doing a Friday links from DailyMail, summarising house prices, celebrity tattoos, and the Kardashian antics for avid CUK followers.

We've already got that, it's called General

[DimPrawn]

Thanks for the links, but look a bit boring this week.

I'm thinking of doing a Friday links from DailyMail, summarising house prices, celebrity tattoos, and the Kardashian antics for avid CUK followers.

[NickFitz]

Sorry about the bad weather - it's only there because I now have time to go out and enjoy the last of the summer

• A Fatal Attempt: Psychological Factors in the Failed World Depth Record Attempt 2015 - "On the 15th August 2015, the technical diving community received sad news that the latest World Depth Record attempt, to 1200ft/365m) had ended in tragedy when the participant, Dr Guy Garman, failed to return from depth to his deep support divers… I would like to consider some psychological factors that seem pertinent to the failed, and fatal, world depth record attempt. I am not seeking to attribute blame, nor to define a cause for the tragedy. I am writing purely for educational purposes in the hope that the information shared may help prevent future accidents.” Diving instructor Andy Davis on a sad case of what seems to be the hubris of a comparatively inexperienced diver. HT to cojak for this one.
  
  
• Intel just open sourced Stephen Hawking’s speech system and it’s a .NET 4.5 WinForms app that you can try for yourself - "I’m typing this sentence with my face. And no, I didn’t somehow smash my face onto a keyboard with laser-like precision. I used Intel’s ACAT, or Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit, an open source platform developed in C# using .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 at Intel Labs to allow people with disabilities to communicate with ease, even in very constrained situations, like Stephen Hawking’s.” Suggestion: install this on your laptop, then make it say something from the audience when nervous graduate students of physics are about to give their first lecture
  Bonus linky (audio): Cosmologist Dr Katie Mack describes what happened when Hawking attended one of the first seminars she gave at Cambridge.
  
  
• The Trials of Ed Graf - "In 1988, he was convicted of killing his stepsons—based on arson science we now know is bunk. A quarter of a century later, Texas granted him a new trial, one that pitted modern forensics against old-fashioned Texas justice."
  
  
• The NASA Design Program - The sad story of how NASA came to lead the way in visual design, only to be brought back to earth by a new Administrator with no taste. ”The meatball was complicated, hard to reproduce, and laden with “Buck Rogers” imagery. Clearly it was born out of the classic airman syndrome where hype and fantasy dominated over logic and reality. Our Logotype was quite the opposite: it was clean, progressive, could be read from a mile away, and was easy to use in all mediums (it later survived much of the inferior printing furnished by the GPO (U.S Government Printing Office).”
  
  
• Corn Wars - "On September 30, 2012, agents from the FBI contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago with an urgent request. They wanted bags from two passengers on an outbound flight to Beijing pulled for immediate inspection… Inside each envelope was a single corn seed. In Ye’s luggage, agents found more corn seeds hidden amid his clothes, each one individually wrapped in napkins from a Subway restaurant. Customs officers were dispatched to the gate area for the Beijing flight, where they found the two men and conducted body searches. Still more corn seeds, also folded into napkins, were discovered in Ye’s pockets.” The US government is so concerned about China stealing genetically modified US crop strains, it treats it on the same level as the spread of nuclear weapons technology
  
  
• Digital Ding Dong Ditch - Nice little Arduino project with which to drive your neighbour to distraction: ”Digital Ding Dong Ditch is a device I created to hack into and ring my best friend's wireless doorbell whenever I send a text message to the device. The best part of the device is that it causes my friend, without fail, to come outside, find no one, and go back in. In this project, we'll learn not only how to create this device, but how to reverse engineer radio frequencies we know nothing about using RTL-SDR (a ~$14 software defined radio), as well as creating hardware and software using Arduino, the Adafruit FONA (GSM/SMS/2G board), an RF (radio frequency) transmitter to transmit custom signals, and even how to reverse engineer a proprietary radio signal we know nothing about!”
  
  
• The Arc of the Sun: Chasing history in the great South African pigeon race - "I met Paul Smith, the man responsible for shipping the Queen of England’s pigeons, near a sunlit pigeon loft in Linbro Park, a light-industrial section of Johannesburg, South Africa. The loft, home to 2,453 pigeons, has a corrugated aluminum roof with translucent plastic panels to let in the sun and high-grade chicken-wire walls to encourage the circulation of air… The race that is closest to his heart, he confides, is the South African Million Dollar Pigeon Race, which bills itself as the most lucrative pigeon race in the world. The owner of the first-place pigeon receives $150,000, with subsequent finishers taking the balance of the million-dollar purse.”
  
  
• We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life - "Once upon a time, in the year 2007, people were really excited about Second Life… Many universities set up their own private islands to engage students; some even held classes within Second Life. Most of these virtual universities are gone –– it costs almost $300 per month to host your own island –– but it turns out a handful remain as ghost towns.” Commenters point out that at least some of these virtual places are actually still used; Patrick Hogan appears to have made the basic error of visiting during the colleges’ summer vacation
  
  
• Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US - "On Apr 14 2015, the Virginia State Board of Elections immediately decertified use of the AVS WinVote touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine… If an election was held using the AVS WinVote, and it wasn’t hacked, it was only because no one tried. The vulnerabilities were so severe, and so trivial to exploit, that anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded. They didn’t need to be in the polling place – within a few hundred feet (e.g., in the parking lot) is easy, and within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can. Further, there are no logs or other records that would indicate if such a thing ever happened, so if an election was hacked any time in the past, we will never know.” The Russians used a pencil. Of course, they also only had one candidate
  
  
• Watch the Clavilux, an ethereal light organ from 100 years ago - "Long before trippy visualizers and computer animation, before liquid light shows or laser parties, Thomas Wilfred was building organs for visuals. He called the art they produced Lumia, and the instrument Clavilux – a keyboard for light. That first instrument was built all the way back in 1919. But unlike a lot of the spectacles of the era, this one is still hypnotic today, even after all the advances of cinema and computing." Bonus link: MIDI is used not just for music, but for light shows, animatronics, and to choreograph the Bellagio Hotel fountains in Las Vegas.
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!