Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCLXXXIV

[NickFitz]

I clicked on a lot more links than last week....

And yet this week there's a lot less about people's bowels falling out. Odd

[BrilloPad]

I clicked on a lot more links than last week....

[NickFitz]

Three weeks to wait until the next Bank Holiday. That's three weeks of client time to waste reading stuff like this

• Life imitates Akira: the NSA’s fear of psychic nukes - "A classified government document opens with “an odd sequence of events relating to parapsychology has occurred within the last month” and concluded with an alarming question about psychics nuking cities so that they became lost in time and space. If this sounds like a plot out of science fiction, it is - but it’s also a NSA memo from 1977." The Cold War was so much more interesting than all this stuff we get nowadays with people dying and such.
  
  
• Sgt Pepper Photos - A project by Chris Shaw to discover the original photos and artefacts used for the Sergeant Pepper cover photo: ”The collage was designed by Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, and the cut-outs were assembled in Michael Cooper’s London photographic studio. Michael and his team toiled hard to construct the ‘cast of extras’, using a mix of photos sourced from the BBC Hulton Picture Library, images from private collections, waxworks and personal artifacts, including a gnome owned by Ringo Starr.”
  
  
• Calling BS Read Along - "A few weeks ago, someone forwarded me a syllabus for a new class at being offered at the University of Washington this semester, Info 198: Calling Bulltulip… I thought this might be a great time to follow along with their syllabus, week by week, and post my general thoughts and observations as I went along. I’m very interested in how classes like this get thought through and executed, and what topics different people find critical in sharpening their BS detectors." There’s a couple more weeks of the course to go but in the strange days in which we live, you really can’t get started with bulltulip detection soon enough.
  
  
• Confessions Of A Digital Pack Rat: Almost Half A Petabyte And Still Growing - "What do you do when you have almost half a petabyte (PB) of data? That’s the situation in which Michael Oskierko finds himself. He’s a self-proclaimed digital pack rat who’s amassed more than 390 terabytes (TB) total, and it’s continuing to grow." And to think I got excited about buying a new 4TB USB drive for my telly
  
  
• ‘A Guide to Boring’ by Hilaire Belloc - I attended the seventh Boring Conference on Saturday, and one of the other people there was Hel Reynolds, who tweeted this link to her transcript of a Belloc essay on the subject: ”I will beg my readers to get out of their heads (if they have lodged it there) the idea that boring is not to be learnt and practised, because the bores he knows are commonly aimless. That is a great error. I admit that aimless men are often the great bores… But for deliberate and intentional boring you must have a man of some ability to practise it well, as you must to practise any art well.”
  
  
• Last Hindenburg survivor, 88, recalls: ‘The air was on fire’ - Saturday was also the eightieth anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster. Werner Doehner, who was 8 at the time, is the last person aboard still living: ”Suddenly the air was on fire… We were close to a window, and my mother took my brother and threw him out. She grabbed me and fell back and then threw me out.”
  
  
• Your Patek Philippe Caliber 89 Now Needs A Service – A Look At Horology's Easter Problem - "When Patek Philippe released the first Caliber 89 (in 1989) to celebrate its 150th anniversary, it was one of the most complicated watches ever made. One of the most unusual complications in the Caliber 89 is one that hasn't been duplicated since (that I'm aware of, anyway) – an indication for the date of Easter. The reason why is not simply because Patek has a patent for the date-of-Easter mechanism, either. It does, however, have to do with the fact that a true date-of-Easter complication is probably the single most difficult complication in horology – so much so, that despite the Caliber 89, it may, for all intents and purposes, be impossible."
  
  
• The BMW Addiction That Completely Destroyed This Man’s Life - ”’Before we get to your car questions,’ my former next door neighbor, Terrance, said, ‘I need to tell you both something. My wife left me. My kids won’t talk to me. I lost my job. I embezzled almost a half a million dollars because I’m addicted to BMWs, and have been hiding them all over the state. I’ll probably be going to prison soon.’” I wonder if any of their indicators had ever been used?
  
  
• Same Stats, Different Graphs: Generating Datasets with Varied Appearance and Identical Statistics through Simulated Annealing - An interesting paper on deceptive data: ”Recently, Alberto Cairo created the Datasaurus dataset which urges people to ‘never trust summary statistics alone; always visualize your data’, since, while the data exhibits normal seeming statistics, plotting the data reveals a picture of a dinosaur.”
  
  
• Letter from Siberia: Through sands and mountains in search of a gulag ghost-town - Anna Gruzdeva on an expedition to an abandoned Soviet gulag, with photos by Anton Petrov: ”If you scrutinise the map of Siberia, choose a little-known region and pluck up the courage to undertake an unconventional itinerary, you’ll have the chance to experience a Siberia at once recognisable and unanticipated. Some friends and I set off from Krasnoyarsk to the Trans-Baikal region on the Baikal-Amur Mainline, eager to see the Chara Sands desert and the harsh Kodar Mountains, home to numerous glaciers and an abandoned Gulag camp.”
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!