Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCXCVII

Dear Dad, Send Money – Letters from Students in the Middle Ages - "If you have a son or daughter attending university, most likely you will be getting a message from them asking for money. Apparently, this is part of a long tradition that goes back to the beginning of universities in the Middle Ages." If this whets your appetite, the Charles H. Haskins’ article “The Life of Medieval Students as Illustrated by their Letters” referenced at the end is available online: here’s a PDF at the Internet Archive. If you’re on the receiving end of such pleas, you may choose to emulate one mediaeval father who ”excuses himself because of the failure of his vineyards."
Why many drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit - Shockingly, some drivers in China who injure a pedestrian will then drive over them repeatedly to make sure they’re dead, because money: ”In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions.”
How I Shot a Plane Flying Through the Supermoon - Photographer Ryan Lee explains how he captured this great shot:
The Dealer Who Swindled $6 Billion From General Motors - "Between 1980 and 1991, McNamara convinced [General Motors Acceptance Corporation] to advance him $6.2 billion to pay for 248,000 conversion vans that did not exist. It was one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history and ended up costing GMAC $436 million, equal to $725 million in today’s dollars.” A remarkable swindle; as so often in these cases, it seems he was eventually caught only because he got greedy. Well, greedier.
A River Thames Mudlarking Find Brings to Life World War One Soldier, Frederick Jury (1873 - 1932) - "On 22nd August 2016, it will be exactly 100 years since Frederick Jury (Private no. 6044, 3rd infantry Battalion, 19th Reinforcement, in the Australian Imperial Forces) embarked from Australia… How did the story of Frederick Jury come to light? A simple Thames mudlarking find last week one evening after work in Greenwich, London, on Thursday 27th August 2015.” Mudlark Nicola White found a lost brass plate from Private Jury’s luggage, and with the help of others online was able to discover the details of his life.
Procedural Dungeon Generation Algorithm - Deep dive into one approach to generating randomised dungeons, by A Adonaac: ”The data structures I returned from this entire procedure were: a list of rooms (each room is just a structure with a unique id, x/y positions and width/height); the graph, where each node points to a room id and the edges have the distance between rooms in tiles; and then an actual 2D grid, where each cell can be nothing (meaning its empty), can point to a main/hub room, can point to a hallway room or can be hallway cell. With these 3 structures I think it's possible to get any type of data you could want out of the layout and then you can figure out where to place doors, enemies, items, which rooms should have bosses, and so on.”
India's Forgotten Stepwells - "It’s hard to imagine an entire category of architecture slipping off history’s grid, and yet that seems to be the case with India’s incomparable stepwells. Never heard of ‘em? Don’t fret, you’re not alone: millions of tourists – and any number of locals - lured to the subcontinent’s palaces, forts, tombs, and temples are oblivious to these centuries-old water-structures that can even be found hiding-in-plain-sight close to thronged destinations like Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi or Agra’s Taj Mahal." Victoria Lautman has spent several years documenting these ancient structures.
Our Comrade The Electron - Extended transcript of a talk by Maciej Ceglowski at Webstock, New Zealand, last year, on what we can learn about building the future from the history of Soviet technology, and particularly the story of Lev Sergeyevich Termen: ”Lenin was delighted with the theremin and insisted on playing it himself. Like an old tennis pro, Termen stood behind the dictator and moved his arms until he was sure Lenin had the hang of it. Then he let go, and Lenin finished the tune by himself… It's a curiosity of history that all these revolutionary dictators, from Lenin to Steve Jobs, invariably have bourgeois, stodgy taste in music. Lenin played some schmaltzy folk song by Glinka.” (Maciej is becoming something of a regular here, with previous links on accidentally spying on China, steaks in Argentina, and a woman who pretended to have cancer, among others.)
A Life in Games: The Playful Genius of John Conway - Profile of the Liverpudlian mathematician and inventor of games: ”Conway, 77, claims never to have worked a day in his life. Instead, he purports to have frittered away reams and reams of time playing. Yet he is Princeton’s John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics (now emeritus). He’s a fellow of the Royal Society. And he is roundly praised as a genius.”
1975 Pink Floyd 'Comic' Tour Book - When Pink Floyd took Dark Side of the Moon on the road, the programme was a comic book, now scanned for your psychedelic pleasure: ”We first introduced this exhibit in 2002 (The first site on the net to have it) but the quality of the pictures back then was pretty rotten and hard to read. (Bear in mind most people were on dial up back then, so we had to compress the graphics for a faster load). We have now revamped the exhibition, run the original pictures through the latest graphics programs and can now present it in readable form. As an added bonus, at the foot of this page you will find a link to enable you to download all the large images to view at your leisure.”