Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXXVII

[DS23]

fab! that 8 bit correlation guessing game is really addictive! esp after i got the first one 100% at .14 - i kept hunting for more perfect hits. the lomax archives are a treasure trove and no mistake. the blues section will have me entertained forever.

[NickFitz]

"I'll get my CV across to you this afternoon," I told the agent. Why not straight away? Because somebody's got to put together this lot, or you'd have to do some actual work

• Coronado High - "There, on the horizon: a ship… The sailboat was laden with contraband: 4,000 pounds of Thai stick pot, the latest in marijuana commerce, a product as potent as it was valuable, which Dave and his crew—a team of smugglers called the Coronado Company—would unload and sell for millions of dollars.” How a California high school teacher who started smoking dope with his students in the 1960s ended up smuggling tons of marijuana into the USA from Mexico and further afield
  
  
• The 8-Bit Game That Makes Statistics Addictive - "Before I started playing Guess the Correlation, I didn’t expect to spend an hour of my Easter weekend obsessing over an 8-bit video game, much less one based on something that many scientists do every day. I also didn’t expect to be hypnotized by graph after graph of black dots, trying to accurately gauge the patterns they concealed, in exchange for points and a place on a leaderboard. And I definitely didn’t expect to have fun doing it." Ed Yong on a game by Omar Wagih of the European Bioinformatics Institute which is also a research project into how well, or badly, people perceive correlations in data
  
  
• Cabbie’s Curios: The Policemen’s Wall - A wall in London bears many inscribed numbers, carved there by bored Victorian policemen. (Should you go to have a look, be advised that the excellent butcher’s shop of Turner and George is just around the corner.)
  
  
• Every Noise at Once - "This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1387 genres by The Echo Nest. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier. Click anything to hear an example of what it sounds like. Click the » on a genre to see a map of its artists." Not sure why we need so many genres, but there they are.
  
  
• The Real Atlantis: A Walk To Britain's Lost City - Tom Cox visits Dunwich, on that eerie stretch of the east coast that inspired writers such as M. R. James: ”In the early 1300s Dunwich was one of the major ports of East Anglia but over the next six centuries the sea staged a series of devastating attacks on it, bringing the coastline over a mile further inland, and destroying all of the town’s original eight churches… I can be out on one of the most isolated stretches of the South West Coast Path in the worst weather and grainiest winter light and not feel any impulse to look nervously behind me. Here, the impulse is there, constantly. It is a different kind of aloneness that you feel at Dunwich, tinged with the sense that, while you have no places to hide, whatever might follow you has plenty of very subtle ones.”
  
  
• The Root From Issyk-Kul Revisited - "One day in 1970, when I was at the National Cancer Institute, Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, the highly regarded former ambassador to the Soviet Union, walked into my office with his wife, Jane, who was holding two paper bags. Each contained a bottle of 80-proof vodka. Before I could ask why they had brought them, they dumped a pile of dirty roots on my desk and made a most unusual request. They asked if I could combine the roots with the vodka to make a drug that would treat Tommy’s pancreatic cancer." A strange tale of a folk remedy recommended by the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which turned out to have real therapeutic benefits.
  
  
• You (and Almost Everyone You Know) Owe Your Life to This Man - Yet another Soviet officer who managed to stop the world being blown up during the Cold War: ”The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges left and right of the hull. Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. What the Americans don’t know is that this sub has a tactical nuclear torpedo on board, available to launch, and that the Russian captain is asking himself, Shall I fire?”
  
  
• Association for Cultural Equity Sound Collections Guide - A huge collection of recordings from around the world, made by Alan Lomax between the 1940s and 1990s, featuring everything from great American bluesmen to Northumbrian smallpipes to Transylvanian funeral laments: ”The Sound Recordings catalog comprises over 17,400 digital audio files, beginning with Lomax’s first recordings onto (newly invented) tape in 1946 and tracing his career into the 1990s. In addition to a wide spectrum of musical performances from around the world, it includes stories, jokes, sermons, personal narratives, interviews conducted by Lomax and his associates, and unique ambient artifacts captured in transit from radio broadcasts, sometimes inadvertently, when Alan left the tape machine running. Not a single piece of recorded sound in Lomax’s audio archive has been omitted: meaning that microphone checks, partial performances, and false starts are also included.”
  
  
• The Battle over Bodies: A History of Criminal Dissection - "On 29 July 1831, John Amy Bird Bell was found guilty of murdering a young boy for the sake of a few coins. At his trial, Bell expressed no emotion when he was sentenced to death. He did, however, break down when he was informed that his body would be given over to the surgeons to be dissected." Dr Lindsey Fitzharris on the days when being hanged was just the start of your problems.
  
  
• The City Behind the Fence The US Government’s Top Secret Town - ”In 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government created a top ‘Secret Town’ aka ”The Atomic City’ now called Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The government bought up about 68,000 acres of land and about 1,000 Tennessee families were given two weeks or less to vacate. All the while, other secret towns were created elsewhere in the US as part of the race to create an atomic weapon. These photos are a flashback into World War II and a treasure trove of Oak Ridge period history.”
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!