Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCLXXX

[vetran]

love the amendment story!

[Halo Jones]

Ohh good set of links

thanks

[NickFitz]

Maybe this lot can distract you from scratching your weekend sunburn until it bleeds:

• Russians Engineer a Brilliant Slot Machine Cheat—And Casinos Have No Fix - "In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge… But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major jackpots.” Reverse engineering FTW!
  
  
• Badass of the Week: Peter Freuchen - "Lorenc Peter Elfred Freuchen was a 6’7” tall walrus-spearing, peg-legged, anti-Semite-clobbering Danish explorer and badass old-school 1900s explorer who wore a ******* awesome coat made of polar bear fur, rocked a seriously epic beard, rode a dogsled 1,000 kilometers across the Greenland ice cap in the 1910s, killed a wolf with his bare hands, escaped a Nazi death warrant at the height of the Third Reich, amputated his own ******* gangrenous toes with a pair of pliers (and no anesthesia), and starred in a goddamned Oscar-winning movie – which was based on a book that he wrote… He was also the fifth person to win the jackpot in the TV game show The $64,000 Question, published thirty books, founded two Adventurer’s Clubs, and his biography is called The Vagrant Viking." How different from the home life of our own dear Queen
  
  
• Micrometeorites Found on City Rooftops - The sky is falling: ”Do you dread having to clean out those rain gutters this spring? Try rethinking what it is you're cleaning. Mixed in with the muck and debris may just be a few tiny micrometeorites, debris literally from out of this world.”
  
  
• Submerged Forest and Village - On the coast near Mablethorpe, north of Skegness, a sunken forest is revealed at very low tides: ”The stumps, which in the picture give the appearance of basking seals, are relics of the great forest which was swept under the tremendous inrush of sea on New Year’s Day, 1287. The forest, the village of what was then named Malbtorp, and the church of St. Peter’s vanished for ever beneath the waves. Since then it has been recorded that fragments of masonry have washed up, but as time dims the pages of the past so there is less and less tangible evidence, other than written records, of the disaster. All, that is, but the tree trunks which appear only when the moon phases and a favourable wind take the tide back beyond it’s normal point.”
  
  
• The Atlantic Timeline - "Tell us your birthday, and we’ll show you how the world has changed during your lifetime." Also a way of getting links to historically interesting articles from The Atlantic archives, so try selecting years before you were born, too
  
  
• Imaging and imagining black holes - "Until several years ago, most cinematic and artistic depictions of black holes — including many in the pages of Nature — failed to match the known facts. A black hole (the remnant of a runaway gravitational collapse) often looked like a space whirlpool, or perhaps a simple black sphere representing the event horizon — the surface that constitutes a point of no return for anything that falls inside… Thanks in part to physicist Kip Thorne’s involvement,Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar was the first one to show what you would actually see if you were to fly near a black hole.”
  
  
• He Got A Bad Grade. So, He Got The Constitution Amended. Now He's Getting The Credit He Deserves. - Gregory Watson was so disgruntled by a poor grade that he spent years getting a 200-year-old amendment passed: ”Gregory needed 38 states to approve the amendment -- three-quarters. Nine states had already approved it, most back in the 1790s, so that meant he needed 29 more states for it to pass. He wrote letters to members of Congress to see if they knew anyone in their home states who might be willing to push the amendment in their state legislature. When he did get a response, it was generally negative. Some said the amendment was too old; some said they just didn’t know anyone who’d be willing to help. Mostly, he got no response at all.”
  
  
• Rocket Belts and Rocket Chairs: Lunar Flying Units - If the Apollo missions to the Moon had continued, astronauts might have used jet packs to extend the range of their explorations: ”During their travels in the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), the four-wheeled electric car designed to expand the area they could explore and the mass of lunar samples and tools they could transport, Apollo astronauts could not stray beyond a ‘walkback limit.’… During the mid-1960s, proposed Apollo landing sites with scientifically interesting surface features spaced too far apart for "early Apollo" exploration were transferred to lists of candidate targets for more advanced follow-on expeditions.”
  
  
• There’s no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.) - ”Whether you’re a student, teacher, or parent, I think you’ll appreciate this story of how one teacher can completely and permanently change someone’s life in only a few lessons.” Derek Sivers on studying with composer Kimo Williams.
  
  
• Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photography) - ”«Советское фото» — советский, затем российский ежемесячный иллюстрированный журнал Союза журналистов СССР. Был основан в 1926 году советским журналистом Михаилом Кольцовым, при помощи бывших журнальных работников, редакторов журнала Фотографические Новости издаваемого в период с 1906 по 1916 годы в Петербурге, учёных и профессоров Ермилова Николая Евграфовича и Срезневского Вячеслава Измайловича.”, which Google tells me means ""Soviet photo" - Soviet, then Russian monthly illustrated magazine of the Union of Journalists of the USSR. Was founded in 1926 Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov, with the help of former journalists and editors of the magazine Photographic News published in the period from 1906 to 1916 in St. Petersburg, scholars and professors Ermilov Nikolai Evgrafovich and Sreznevsky Vyacheslav Izmailovich." So, Soviet Russian pictures at the Internet Archive
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!