Monday Links from the Fens vol. CCCXXXIX

You are not logged in or you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:

You are not logged in. If you are already registered, fill in the form below to log in, or follow the "Sign Up" link to register a new account.

You may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system?

If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation.

Monday Links from the Fens vol. CCCXXXIX

This morning I made a butty for my lunch, then left it behind when I drove the 70 miles to ClientCo

While I drive round to the petrol station for an inferior snack of some kind, you can be reading this lot:

This Is Your Brain On War - The US military is using lessons learned by psychologists and physiologists in the world of sport to enhance battlefield performance: ”We were looking at a fundamental question: Is the fear that you feel in the Super Bowl the same fear as the fear you feel in combat? The answer, it turns out, is yes. That’s huge. Anything that we can use in the athletic world we can use in combat. That’s one of the greatest revolutions of our time in improving performance on the battlefield.”
An Investigation of Asparagus Pee - "Ben Franklin called it a "disagreeable odour." Marcel Proust praised it as a "perfume." Here we look into the mystery of an odd phenomenon." Ugh, vegetables
What is it? An oral history of Izzy, the mascot marketing snafu of Olympic proportions - If you thought the London 2012 Olympic Mascots were bad, hear the sad tale of the people responsible for the fiasco that was the Atlanta 1996 Mascot: ”Mention was made that kids are wearing their hats backward, so maybe Izzy should have its shoes on backward. I raised my hand and said, “Maybe not?” They left the shoes the way they are. But I was removed from the process when I tried being the voice of reason.”
My four months as a private prison guard - Journalist Shane Bauer got a job as a prison guard, to find out what things are really like: ”Have you ever had a riot?" I ask a recruiter from a prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). "The last riot we had was two years ago," he says over the phone. "Yeah, but that was with the Puerto Ricans!" says a woman's voice, cutting in. "We got rid of them." "When can you start?" the man asks. I tell him I need to think it over.”
Understand the Brain? Let’s Try Donkey Kong First. - Derek Lowe on attempts to understand the 6502 microprocessor using techniques developed to analyse actual nervous systems: ”You can get as much “behavioral” and phenotypic data as you want from a 6502 chip, but it doesn’t help. Trying to learn what’s going on from the equivalent of brain lesions was, for example, not too informative. They used Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Pitfall as behaviors of the chip and tried to learn backwards from those…”
2 Types of Travelers - Some cartoons from The Cooper Review; I’m definitely number two in this one:
Watch as the world’s cities appear one-by-one over 6,000 years - "The researchers compiled the data by digitizing, geocoding, and standardizing information from past research published about historical urban populations. The result is a clean, accessible dataset of cities, their locations, and their populations over time, going as far back as 3700 B.C." The animated map is at The History of Urbanization.
The time a small town booked a Rage Against the Machine show then shat its pants about it - "Take the small town of Spanish Fork, Utah… when their fairgrounds manager booked a Rage Against the Machine show, the residents and the local news all UTTERLY FLIPPED THEIR LIDS. Local lore holds that the booking was made under the misapprehension that “Rage Against the Machine” was the name of a touring tractor-pull or monster truck rally.”
The Perks Are Great. Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do. - 50onRed is one of those obnoxious companies that forces things like browser toolbars onto the machines of hapless web surfers. Their developers can work there for months before finding out what they do: ”Tyler was not pleased when a colleague finally explained the business model to him. “Wait, really? That’s what we do?” he remembers thinking. “We’re that skeezy toolbar company that your grandmother installs that she can’t get out and she’s got seven of ’em and her computer doesn’t work anymore?””
20 of the most beautiful libraries in the world - they are indeed lovely, though it’s unfortunate that TechInsider managed to spell “Bodleian” wrong in the photo caption