Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCIX

This week five years ago, due to circumstances beyond my control, you had to wait until Tuesday to waste your client's time. No delays this week, though

Canary in the Code Mine - As the coal mining industry of the Appalachians dies, some miners are retraining as software developers: ”Rusty thought a potential miner-to-coder pipeline actually makes a weird kind of sense. After all, coal was the back-end code of 200 years of industrial progress — the fuel that bent the steel for Ford cars and train tracks and skyscrapers, and much of the electricity to light them. And Silicon Valley has shown that the digital economy doesn’t have to be created in the same place that it’s consumed. It can happen two hours from the nearest airport, in a place where building a new road requires sawing a mountain in half, by people who have different politics, accents and hobbies than the end-users.”
A eulogy for RadioShack, the panicked and half-dead retail empire - Jon Bois recalls his not-so-halcyon days working for the once-great American retailer: ”Once, during a store visit, my district manager scolded me for not wearing the name tag I didn't have, and insisted I wear a proper one, any one we had lying around. I had the option of being Chad or Elizabeth. I decided to be Elizabeth, and then he said that no, I could not be Elizabeth.”
How Two 18th-Century Lady Pirates Became BFFs on the High Seas - Hadley Meares on two female scourges of the seas: ”The fact that Anne Bonny and Mary Read ever crossed paths at all is almost unbelievable. Of the thousands of pirates active in the Caribbean during the 17th and 18th centuries, we know the names of just two female marauders. In 1719, the pair would forge an improbable friendship that would start on the high seas and end less than two years later in a damp, dark jail in Spanish Town, Jamaica."
Whale Fall - "A few years ago I helped push a beached humpback whale back out into the sea, only to witness it return and expire under its own weight on the sand. For the three days that it died the whale was a public attraction. People brought their children down to see it. They would stand in the surf and wave babies in pastel rompers over the whale, as if to catch the drift of an evaporating myth." Rebecca Giggs on the death of a cetacean.
Amazing Encounters: Apollo 13′s Jim Lovell - "Captain James “Jim” Lovell, a veteran of four space flights, was part the Apollo crew that flew closer to the Sun than any other, and also holds the unfortunate accolade of being the only person to fly to the Moon twice and never step foot on it. At 87, he’s starting to look a little frail, but that doesn’t stop him holding court for over an hour in a room packed with space enthusiasts. I’m back in Pontefract for the latest in the incredible series of Space Lectures and I, like the rest of the audience, am totally captivated by Captain Lovell." SpaceKate records Lovell’s reminiscences about his missions aboard Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8, and Apollo 13.
America's Forgotten Female Astronauts - Elizabeth Yuko on a NASA scientist’s early attempts to get women involved in the USA’s space missions: ”NASA called the experiment Project Mercury and recruited Air Force and Navy pilots to try out the astronaut tests. But because women were banned from being Air Force or Navy pilots, women were excluded from the original astronaut trials… Many of the women scored as highly—if not higher—than the men. At the end of it all, 13 of the 20 female pilots passed the tests. The women were called the Mercury 13, though they also went by First Lady Astronaut Trainees—or FLATs, reflecting not only their pioneering status, but conveniently, also a type of sensible shoe.”
WarGames for real: How one 1983 exercise nearly triggered WWIII - Sean Gallagher uncovers yet another time when Cold War suspicion and paranoia nearly did for us all: "Named for an acronym for "Nuclear Missile Attack" (Ракетное Ядерное Нападение), RYAN was an intelligence operation started in 1981 to help [the KGB] forecast if the US and its allies were planning a nuclear strike. The KGB believed that by analyzing quantitative data from intelligence on US and NATO activities relative to the Soviet Union, they could predict when a sneak attack was most likely. As it turned out, Exercise Able Archer '83 triggered that forecast."
The centenarian in Brentford’s workhouse: piecing together the life of Mary Hicks - "When I visited the churchyard of All Saints, Isleworth, earlier in the year, I’d gone in search of the plague pit there. However, whilst exploring the burial ground, I also came across a headstone that commemorated a person who would probably have disappeared into an unmarked paupers’ grave were it not for the great age she lived to. Mary Hicks, who died in 1870 at the grand old age of 104, spent the last twenty-seven years of her life as an inmate of the Brentford Workhouse."
Deadly nightshade poisoning - A first-hand account of what it’s like to be poisoned by Atropa belladonna: ”I mistook deadly nightshade for elder berries & ate between 20-30 berries… They quickly decided to take me to hospital an hour away. On the way I started hallucinating. Where there was one hedgehog I saw thousands. Deer were kangaroos. I was also delirious. I didn't really know what was going on - someone would tell me to do something so I thought I did it, but didn’t… Every hallucination seemed as real to me as real life. I saw people I worked with and would have full conversations with them. Then, they would be gone.”
Faig Ahmed Creates Glitched-Out Contemporary Rugs from Traditional Azerbaijani Textiles - "Faig Ahmed distorts the patterns of traditional Azerbaijani rugs, dimantling their structure in order to build compositions that trick the eye by appearing to melt off the wall. By rearticulating the original design, he creates contemporary sculptural forms that look like digital glitches, patterns flatlining halfway through a tapestry or gradually morphing into a digital mosaic." More of these at his own site.