Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCVI

[d000hg]

There ARE doors which allow you to get around more quickly (in ours anyway) - you don't think the staff have to walk the long way around do you?

That said, the Ikea cafe is pretty good as these things go. They even serve beer, quite cheaply.

The fast-food by the exit would be great if the hot dogs weren't so bad

[NickFitz]

FTFY. They make it physically impossible to get in and out without first having to have navigated your way through the entire place. And then you have to find the things you actually wanted in the warehouse bit as well.

Last time I was there, I spotted a place where they'd failed to shove a couple of wardrobes that were almost back-to-back in adjacent-but-far-apart displays close enough together, squeezed through the gap, and managed to skip half the store

I remembered other stuff to do today, so I still have it to look forward to tomorrow, or Wednesday, or…

[MicrosoftBob]

FTFY. They make it physically impossible to get in and out without first having to have navigated your way through the entire place. And then you have to find the things you actually wanted in the warehouse bit as well.

Considering their origins, herding cattle where they want to go is rather to be expected surely

[DaveB]

No. It's Ikea. I hate shops and shopping. I want to get in and out as fast as is humanly possible, so there won't be any time for eating. I wouldn't enjoy eating anyway, not in a shop

FTFY. They make it physically impossible to get in and out without first having to have navigated your way through the entire place. And then you have to find the things you actually wanted in the warehouse bit as well.

[NickFitz]

How exactly is that a bad thing? Extra large portion of meat balls served with Chips, Apple pie and bottomless mugs of coffee

And don't forget to stock up on their Mustard and Dill sauce.

No. It's a shop. I hate shops and shopping. I want to get in and out as fast as is humanly possible, so there won't be any time for eating. I wouldn't enjoy eating anyway, not in a shop

[FatLazyContractor]

I really ought to go to Ikea today

How exactly is that a bad thing? Extra large portion of meat balls served with Chips, Apple pie and bottomless mugs of coffee

And don't forget to stock up on their Mustard and Dill sauce.

[NickFitz]

I really ought to go to Ikea today You lucky people get to sit at your nice, comfy ClientCo instead and skive off by reading this lot:

• Portraits of Place in Antarctica - "I’m Shaun O’Boyle, a photographer, and I’ve had the great good fortune to be accepted into the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers program." O’Boyle has been in Antarctica since mid-October, and is writing about his experiences and posting photos on this blog.
  
  
  
  
  
• What do James Bond, Downton Abbey, and the CIA have in Common? - ”The fictional worlds of James Bond and Downton Abbey intersect in an unexpected way with the real-life location upon which CIA Headquarters now stands.”
  
  
• Blood Ties - "Two brilliant college lovers were convicted of a brutal slaying. All these years later, why has the case become a cause?" The strange case of the murder of Derek and Nancy Haysom in 1985, and the dubious convictions of their daughter Elizabeth and her boyfriend Jens Soering for the crime.
  
  
• Facial expressions - A parameterised cartoon face generating experiment by Amit Patel of Red Blob Games; if you want to see how it works, the main source file is facegen.js: ”The parameter space is a a five dimensional hypercube (with a slice cut off for the one constraint). In addition, the (skew, rotate) parameters add asymmetry to the mouth, and (browLift, browAngle) control the eyebrows. I haven’t worked on eyes yet.”
  
  
• Birds saved centuries old documents in their nests - Turns out the birds are compiling dossiers on us: ”During the restoration work in the Assumption Cathedral built in early XV century in Zvenigorod Russian archaeologists found numerous birds’ nests built throughout several centuries under the decayed roof. Researchers were surprised when during the decomposition of the nests they started finding paper documents from different periods in the addition to birds’ bones and eggshells."
  
  
• Ramanujan surprises again - Mathematicians have discovered yet more ways in which Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was way ahead of his time: ”Ono and Trebat-Leder found that Ramanujan had also delved into the theory of elliptic curves. He did not anticipate the path taken by Wiles, but instead discovered an object that is more complicated than elliptic curves. When objects of this kind were rediscovered around forty years later they were adorned with the name of K3 surfaces — in honour of the mathematicians Ernst Kummer, Erich Kähler and Kunihiko Kodaira, and the mountain K2, which is as difficult to climb as K3 surfaces are difficult to handle mathematically.”
  
  
• Open Plaques - "Documenting the historical links between people and places, as recorded by commemorative plaques." If there’s a plaque near you, you can find out all about it here; or, if it’s not listed, why not add it yourself?
  
  
• Doing Business In Japan - I’ve linked to a few of Patrick McKenzie’s pieces about running a small SaaS business in the past; this one is all about life as a salaryman, and the cultural expectations you’ll have to overcome if you plan on going into business for yourself in Japan: ”When I started my own company, I was living in an apartment that I had first rented as an employee of a megacorp. The entirety of the credit investigation was me presenting my business card to them… When I quit my day job, I called the landlord to apprise them of this fact, as I was required to by the terms of the lease. At the time, I had somewhere north of $50k a year of income, and rent of $400 a month. I was immediately asked to leave the apartment “at your first available convenience” because “self-employed” is about one half-step above “homeless vagabond” in terms of social esteem in Japan.”
  
  
• Theorem of the Day - "Welcome to a gallery whose exhibits are the crowning achievements of mathematics: her theorems… Each theorem has been presented so as to be appreciated by as wide an audience as possible. If the statement of the theorem appears obscure, pass on to the illustration and its accompanying explanation. If it still seems hard it is probably because it is hard. But no more than O'Keeffe's Blue and Green Music, say, is a 'hard' painting or Hepworth's Two Figures is a 'hard' sculpture. It is there for you to engage with on your own terms.”
  
  
• Nov. 4, 1922: The discovery of Tutankhamun, in color - They didn’t actually have colour film, but for a forthcoming exhibition in New York commemorating the ninety-third anniversary of the discovery of the pharaoh’s tomb, a large number of photographs have been colourised. ”At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold — everywhere the glint of gold.”
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!