Monday Links from the Fens vol. CCCXLIX

[BigRed]

Base jumpers - dying at all levels

I think you'll find ground level has the most fatalities

[vetran]

Give them time

yep they have already dispensed with the Monarchy and got an all female workforce soon Comrade Corbyn will lead them to victory.

[NickFitz]

Bit disappointed by the ants.

I was expecting them to be 6 feet long and to have evolved language and opposable thumbs !

Give them time

[BrilloPad]

That photo was taken on Table Mountain, in Cape Town in 2012. He clipped the ridge and broke both of his legs.

As I say to my kids. If you base jump and break both your legs, don't come running to me.

[Scruff]

Great set of links.. and I'm only half way through them.

On the BASE jumpers one. I follow Jeb Corliss on Facebook and he just lives in a different world to normal people. If he's not flying through 30 foot cracks and skimming cliff edges by less than 15 ft (one of them he hit) he's diving with Sharks. It's hardly surprising many of these people are meeting an untimely end looking at the lengths they go to go one better. Shame they don't think about everyone else around them when they are looking at the next thrill...

That photo was taken on Table Mountain, in Cape Town in 2012. He clipped the ridge and broke both of his legs.

[ctdctd]

Bit disappointed by the ants.

I was expecting them to be 6 feet long and to have evolved language and opposable thumbs !

[vetran]

Almost 2 million new gun records every month he has to figure out what to do with. Almost 2 million slips of paper that record the sale of a gun—who bought it and where—like a glorified receipt.

It would be reasonable to assume, as many people do, that since 4473 is a federal form, the feds have them all locked up somewhere safe, but they don't. They are kept at the store that sold the gun; only when the retailer goes out of business do the gun records come here to the tracing center, which accounts for Charlie's box problem. Those are just the out-of-business records he's dealing with in the corridors and the shipping containers in the parking lot.

JHC

[cojak]

Base jumping - i've always thought 'that looks fecking dangerous - an inch either way and he would have been smeared along that rock formation'.

[vetran]

the Gun registry things is astounding. No computerised register those Americans are nuts!

[NickFitz]

Is base jumping where they jump off a mountain crag and glide down for thousands of feet at speeds approaching 200 MPH within feet of razor sharp rocks?

Yes, the question is very apt. It's completely mystifying why any of them are ever killed.

Indeed; one of those questions to which the answer is "Well, duh"

[northernladuk]

Great set of links.. and I'm only half way through them.

On the BASE jumpers one. I follow Jeb Corliss on Facebook and he just lives in a different world to normal people. If he's not flying through 30 foot cracks and skimming cliff edges by less than 15 ft (one of them he hit) he's diving with Sharks. It's hardly surprising many of these people are meeting an untimely end looking at the lengths they go to go one better. Shame they don't think about everyone else around them when they are looking at the next thrill...

[OwlHoot]

[*]Why Are So Many BASE Jumpers Dying?

Is base jumping where they jump off a mountain crag and glide down for thousands of feet at speeds approaching 200 MPH within feet of razor sharp rocks?

Yes, the question is very apt. It's completely mystifying why any of them are ever killed.

[NickFitz]

Almost forgot it was Monday until I realised that the overwhelming sense of existential dread pervading every fibre of my being wasn't just due to the weather

• Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns - "There's no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose." The power of the US gun lobby means it’s actually against the law for the government to create a proper system for tracing gun ownership; this is how the ATF works around that ludicrous limitation.
  
  
• Why Are So Many BASE Jumpers Dying? - "A wingsuit BASE jumper just live-streamed his own death—marking the latest fatality in the sport’s deadliest year. We explore why fliers at all levels are dying in this extreme activity." If (like me) you’ve seen those wingsuit videos and thought “That looks like fun”, this article may give you pause.
  
  
• Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker - ”For the past several years, a group of researchers has been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we've seen before." Dystopian nuclear bunker ants FTW!
  
  
• Doomsday planning for less crazy folk - Leaving to one side the lunatic fringe holed up in the forest building bunkers, this piece offers useful advice for the rest of us: ”It's not that life-altering disasters are rare: every year, we hear about millions of people displaced by wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods. Heck, not a decade goes by without at least one first-class democracy lapsing into armed conflict or fiscal disarray. But having grown up in a period of unprecedented prosperity and calm, we take our way of life for granted - and find it difficult to believe that an episode of bad weather or a currency crisis could destroy almost everything we worked for… The purpose of this guide is to combat the mindset of learned helplessness by promoting simple, level-headed, personal preparedness techniques that are easy to implement, don't cost much, and will probably help you cope with whatever life throws your way.”
  
  
• When this is over, you will have nothing that you want - Garrison Keillor addresses Donald Trump: ”The cap does not look good on you, it's a duffer's cap, and when you come to the microphone, you look like the warm-up guy, the guy who announces the license number of the car left in the parking lot, doors locked, lights on, motor running. The brim shadows your face, which gives a sinister look, as if you'd come to town to announce the closing of the pulp factory. Your eyes look dead and your scowl does not suggest American greatness so much as American indigestion.”
  
  
• Famous People Who Died In London... Mapped - "Did you know that Judy Garland and Ingrid Bergman took their last breaths in London? That Charles II died a few metres from the site of his father's execution? That Mama Cass and The Who drummer Keith Moon departed this world from the same flat (owned by fellow musician Harry Nilsson)?" A neat little map with the places famous people have died in London; they’re accepting suggestions for others to add.
  
  
• SAGE: The First National Air Defense Network - ”When the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, the United States government concluded that it needed a real-time, state-of-the-art air defense system. It turned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which in turn recruited companies and other organizations to design what would be an online system covering all of North America using many technologies, a number of which did not exist yet. Could it be done? It had to be done. Such a system had to observe, evaluate and communicate incoming threats much the way a modern air traffic control system monitors flights of aircraft.” IBM’s official history of the ground-breaking system.
  
  
• This Undertaker Buries the Bodies Nobody Else Will Touch - From AIDS patients to terrorists, Peter Stefan won’t turn anyone away from his funeral home: ”’Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.’ Like many funeral home directors, Stefan likes to paraphrase this quote from William Gladstone, the nineteenth-century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but most funeral home directors don’t make it their mission the way Stefan does.”
  
  
• Dwarf Fortress' creator on how he's 42% towards simulating existence - An entertaining interview with Tarn Adams: ”Now, the cats would walk into the taverns, right, and because of the old blood footprint code from, like, eight years ago or something, they would get alcohol on their feet. It was originally so people could pad blood around, but now any liquid, right, so they get alcohol on their feet… And so the cats, when they cleaned the alcohol off their feet, they all got drunk. Because they were drinking… The original bug report is, ‘There’s cat vomit all over my tavern, and there’s a few dead cats,’ or whatever.”
  
  
• The Lonely Grandeur of Beachfront Motels - "The photographer Mark Havens spent a decade photographing mid-century architecture along the New Jersey coast."
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!