Monday Links from the Dentist's Chair vol. CCCXLII

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Monday Links from the Dentist's Chair vol. CCCXLII

Day off today as I have the dentist at, most appropriately, 2:30

A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved - "What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions." Interesting thoughts on how we got to the point of having interesting thoughts about how we have interesting thoughts.
A brief history of the British Speaking Clock - "For many of us, British Telecom’s Speaking Clock (or TIM) – which next week celebrates its 80th anniversary – is so much the last word in reliability and accuracy that we have never asked ourselves why the recorded message includes the bizarre word “stroke”." All together now: “bip bip bip”
A Chemist Accidentally Creates A New Blue. Then What? - How colours happen: ”In 2009, as part of his lab at Oregon State University, Subramanian — a professor of materials science — was working with students to manufacture new materials that could be used in electronics. They would mix and grind chemicals, then heat them to over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit… Smith and Subramanian, as it turns out, stumbled upon an undiscovered pigment of blue — the first new blue in over 200 years.”
How Daphne Oram’s radical turntable experiments were brought to life after 70 years - "Years before founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram wrote a ground-breaking piece for turntables and orchestra. Rejected by BBC bosses and never performed, ‘Still Point’ has remained unheard for 70 years – until now."
This 680-Year-Old Saint’s Hand Has Never Decomposed - "Elizabeth of Aragon, a Spanish princess turned Portuguese queen turned Roman Catholic saint, has been dead for 680 years, but her hand—and presumably, the rest of her body—remains impervious to the effects of decomposition. The saint is, either through divine intervention or fortuitous coincidence, what the Church would call “incorrupt.”" Sadly, you’ve just missed the opportunity to see her hand as part of the 500 year anniversary celebrations.
Reversing the wall - Apple had a wall of text at their recent developer conference. Martin Conte Mac Donell explains how he used photo stitching and OCR with open source tools to recreate the whole thing: ”I wasn’t trying to make the ephemeral endure, I was just wondering if it could be done before the conference was over.”
The Internet of Things has a dirty little secret: it's not really yours - "I started the Internet of tulip Twitter account a year ago, sensing a trend in the rush to desperately add Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to everything: nobody really knew why any of this stuff was being put online." (Had to use bit.ly to get this link past the Naughty Words Filter™, due to it having Internet of tulip’s Twitter handle in the URL.)
Women Were Included in the Civil Rights Act as a Joke - "And a racist joke, at that. But working women and black civil rights lawyers had the last laugh when they brought women’s workplace rights to the courts and won." This is what happens when bigots try to do satire
Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All - It seems the short-fingered vulgarian isn’t quite the master of letters he claims to be: ”If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”” Also feeling rather dismayed at having encouraged Trump by mocking him is BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins: ”Won't it be great when Donald Trump becomes president because you wrote a ******* article daring him to run? I mean, won’t that be ******* fantastic?”
Snow ghosts - I see DimPrawn has already posted the BBC's article today about Danila Tkachenko’s London exhibition of photographs of snowy outposts of the former Soviet Union, but these on the exhibition venue’s site are bigger and there are more of them: ”The architecture of Restricted Areas is scattered across Eurasia: from an observatory in Kazakhstan to submarines in the Volga region of Samara and oil fields in the remote republic of Bashkortostan. But through Tkachenko’s lens they become part of a single winter landscape, minimal and saturated with whiteness.”