Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCCII

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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCCCII

Shocking scenes here as I realise there's no bacon in the house. Just posting these quickly before rushing over to the cob shop for urgent supplies

I downloaded an app. And suddenly, was part of the Cajun Navy. - As Hurricane Harvey struck Texas, Holly Hartman started listening in on an app used by volunteers to coordinate activity: ”They asked if there was anyone who could work through the night to keep taking rescue requests and log them. I sat up and turned on my light. I timidly pushed the "talk" button and said, "I can.”… Within minutes, I was on the phone with Karen. Karen was in a house in Port Arthur, sitting on her kitchen cabinet with seven other adults, two teenagers and a newborn. The water was almost to the counter tops.”
‘Bring pencils’ and 49 other things hurricane pros know - And if you’re a journalist covering a hurricane, there’s some things you should know: ”Martin … spent 29 years at the Miami Herald. He held a variety of roles there, including senior writer in charge of hurricane coverage. Over the years, he sent this note out to the staff in advance of hurricanes, including the devastating barrage of storms that wracked Florida in 2004 and 2005.”
New Life Found That Lives Off Electricity - "Scientists have figured out how microbes can suck energy from rocks. Such life-forms might be more widespread than anyone anticipated." I’m pretty sure this was a Star Trek: TOS episode, but it turns out you can find such weird beasties right here
Zilog z80 to Motorola 6809 Transcode – Part 001 – General CPU transcoding info to Zilog z80 to Motorola 6809 Transcode – Part 024 – PAC MAN is finally complete, if you have a CoCo 3 with 512k give it a try… - Use the next/previous post links at the top of each post to navigate through this epic project spanning eight months by Glen Hewlett: ”For my own knowledge I’m trying to port the original Pac Man arcade game to run on my old Color Computer 3. This will probably be a more general description of the Z80 to 6809 conversion, so it should be useful to others if they want to do the same thing for other old games.” And, because this is the future, you can run his port in your browser on a Tandy CoCo 3 emulator at the Internet Archive: Pac-Man Coco3 Transcode v1.01. I used to do this sort of thing for a living in the 1980s, and can confirm that this is an awesome achievement <- nearest we have to a Pac-Man smiley
The U.S. Spy Hub in the Heart of Australia - Menwith Hill can’t reach around the other side of the globe, so the NSA has an equivalent base in Australia, whose capabilities are here analysed based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden: ”Pine Gap has in recent years been used as a command post for two missions. The first, named M7600, involved at least two spy satellites and was said in a secret 2005 document to provide “continuous coverage of the majority of the Eurasian landmass and Africa.” This initiative was later upgraded as part of a second mission, named M8300, which involved “a four satellite constellation” and covered the former Soviet Union, China, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and territories in the Atlantic Ocean.”
The Women of the Bauhaus School - A look at the work of the women of the modernist art school, who still had to put up with the sexist attitudes of the period: ”While women were allowed into the German school—and its manifesto stated that it welcomed “any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex”—a strong gender bias still informed its structure. Female students, for instance, were encouraged to pursue weaving rather than male-dominated mediums like painting, carving, and architecture. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius encouraged this distinction through his vocal belief that men thought in three dimensions, while women could only handle two.”
How Long to Read - "How Long to Read is a book search engine that helps you find out how long it will take to read books and provide reading time data that is tailored to you. With our simple WPM (words per minute) test you can find out how long it will take you to read almost anything, and also use our search engine to find books that will fit the time you have to read." Handy when you want to find out if you can fit War and Peace into that unexpected delay at Doncaster, or should go for something by Barbara Cartland instead.
The Corpus Christi Prime - Cambridge maths student Jack Hodkinson outlines the method he followed to find a prime number that ”…looks rather a lot like Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The top left corner encodes my initials, JRH, in ASCII. The bottom right corner is my date of birth.”
Laurel & Jihadi - InfoSec researcher the grugq on the methods now used by ISIS to recruit and radicalise terrorist operatives in the West: ”Effective counterterrorism and police work, plus the loss of border access to Turkey, has pretty much shut off the terrorist group’s ability to infiltrate trained operatives into Europe. They’ve resorted to a purely virtualised terrorism – the volunteers are found online, handled online, and their attacks promoted (primarily by the mainstream media) online.”
Get a First Look Inside a Newly Opened Egyptian Tomb - You’ve probably heard about the recently-discovered goldsmith’s tomb in Luxor; NatGeo has some excellent photos from within by Nariman El-Mofty.