Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCXXXII

[OwlHoot]

[*]Every Episode of David Attenborough’s Life Series, Ranked - In honour of Sir David’s 90th birthday yesterday, Ed Yong has watched all of his Life programmes and ranked them: ”Recent series like Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and Life are not represented here. Although many bill them as “Attenborough shows,” he only narrated them… No, this list focuses on the big series that he himself wrote and presented, the ones that are most marbled with his influence, the ones that feature his beaming face along with his velvet voice. There are nine, starting with Life on Earth in 1979 and going up to Life in Cold Blood in 2008.” Bonus quiz, also by Ed, over at NatGeo: Can You Tell What Animal David Attenborough Is Talking About? ...

Yesterday, for want of something better on carpy Sky TV, I was watching one of his wildlife programs from the 70s.

I never realised before how intrusive the incessant background music is, maybe because it sounds more twee and dated these days and thus more noticeable.

It would be brilliant if they could remaster all his programs to give one the option of turning off the stupid music.

[sasguru]

Excellent stuff as ever!!

I love the reverse engineering posts. I so wish it's something I could do. I did an electronics qualification back in the day and dabbled for a bit after but lost interest. I can't code either so it's just not for me but damn it's clever and I can see the kick people can get out of solving it. A fairly simple example but great results.

Can't engineer, can't code and can't work from home.
You're deffo NCOTBAC.

[WTFH]

The ATM skimmer story was good, then I read the bio for the author...




"Matt is a penetration tester from Kansas City, MO."

[northernladuk]

Excellent stuff as ever!!

I love the reverse engineering posts. I so wish it's something I could do. I did an electronics qualification back in the day and dabbled for a bit after but lost interest. I can't code either so it's just not for me but damn it's clever and I can see the kick people can get out of solving it. A fairly simple example but great results.

[NickFitz]

Running a little late today as I had a phone interview to focus on this morning; but finally, here we are:

• The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies - How’s this for a surprise on your twentieth birthday: ”A team of armed, black-clad men… streamed into the house, screaming, “FBI!” Another team entered from the back; men dashed up the stairs, shouting at everyone to put their hands in the air… the FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys’ parents. Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova.”
  
  
• Can’t Hack a Hacker: Reverse Engineering a Discovered ATM Skimmer - Matt South found an ATM skimmer when he went to get some cash while on holiday in Bali, so naturally he took it and started probing: ”Threading the braided wires into those tiny holes one at a time was an exercise in patience. After 40 minutes or so, I got them all aligned. I had to hold the wires in with my hand while I plugged the USB cable into my computer… there is over 11GB of video files in the “VIDEO” folder. 45 minutes later, the files are still copying to my machine. The whole time I have to hold the cable and not move lest I break the transfer.”
  
  
• Inside the 19th-Century Free Love Commune Powered by Electric Sex, Eugenics and Delusions of Immortality - "John Humphrey Noyes so fervently believed sleeping around could lead to immortality that he convinced 300 people to join him in a utopian socialist community built on that very principle, in upstate New York. As he saw it, promiscuous “interlocked contact” between men and women—in the form of a polyamory scheme he called “Complex Marriage”—would generate enough spiritual energy to propel the human race into some sort of electrically powered, divinely connected eternal life." It seems it didn’t work but hey, it was worth a try
  
  
• Every Episode of David Attenborough’s Life Series, Ranked - In honour of Sir David’s 90th birthday yesterday, Ed Yong has watched all of his Life programmes and ranked them: ”Recent series like Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and Life are not represented here. Although many bill them as “Attenborough shows,” he only narrated them… No, this list focuses on the big series that he himself wrote and presented, the ones that are most marbled with his influence, the ones that feature his beaming face along with his velvet voice. There are nine, starting with Life on Earth in 1979 and going up to Life in Cold Blood in 2008.” Bonus quiz, also by Ed, over at NatGeo: Can You Tell What Animal David Attenborough Is Talking About?
  
  
• Emojipedia Blog - The ultimate source for far, far more information about developments in the world of emoji than you really need: ”Microsoft surprised many last week by including an overhaul of all emojis in the preview release of the Windows 10 ‘Anniversary Update’… You might have figured based on the way these are shown above on most platforms, these have been implemented as Zero Width Joiner sequences. Each combines the 🐱 Cat Face with another emoji such as the 👤 Bust in Silhouette or 🚀 Rocket to make a new character.”
  
  
• Vox Ex Machina - "In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. It was called the “Voder,” short for “Voice Operating Demonstrator.” It looked sort of like a futuristic church organ… The entire production was done live, with the keys and pedals of the Voder imitating the effects of the human vocal tract and producing the most basic building blocks of speech. The Voderette played them in a complex sequence, synthesizing speech in real-time." And its inventor ended up helping to win the war by devising a method for encrypting speech communications between the leaders of the Allies.
  
  
• The Essence of Mathematics, in One Beatles Song - Ben Orlin explains how the ending of A Day in the Life reveals the mysteries of the universe: ”Producer George Martin had some very odd and vague instructions to the musicians. Start quiet; end loud. Start low in pitch; end high. ‘You’ve got to make your own way up there,’ he said, ‘as slidey as possible so that the clarinets slurp, trombones gliss, violins slide without fingering any notes. Most of all, don’t listen to the fellow next to you because I don’t want you to be doing the same thing.’”
  
  
• Writing with the machine - Robin Sloan has taken some free AI software and put together a Recurrent Neural Network which can be trained on a corpus of text and will then offer suggestions on how to finish your sentences, coming up with something Zeity would find familiar: ”If I had to offer an extravagant analogy (and I do) I’d say it’s like writing with a deranged but very well-read parrot on your shoulder.”
  
  
• What The Victorians Threw Away: The Database - "The database contains hundreds of objects discarded by our great great grandparents. You can explore items from the nursery, bottles and pots from the larder, crockery from the dresser and a host of other remnants of a vanished material culture… You can also search by location and by decade to see objects from one assemblage or objects from the 1890s, say." Quite literally a load of rubbish.
  
  
• The Making of “The Journey Begins” - No apology for returning to Daniel Lieske, creator of The Wormworld Saga, for this account of how the drawing that inspired the saga came about ten years ago: ”It was one of these moments when you're nearly asleep, you drift off, and suddenly an idea enters your mind… I had often thought about entering on of CG Society's contests but never really connected to one of their themes. But in this case I remembered the idea I had a few weeks before and thought that it fit perfectly.”
  
  
  

Nice-weather-bonus-linky from norrahe’s blog: Slow cooked sticky ribs with a BBQ sauce - Kitchen Exile

Happy invoicing!