Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDVI

[northernladyuk]

One that I'm sure would have made next week's list - looking at the number above I've already read last week

In 1973, I invented Bailey's Irish Cream
One for Cojak / Sue Ellen and especially NorthernLadyUK

The M-i-L makes a fine Bailey's alternative from poitín, which she gets from a cousin up on the mountain...

Anyway, Bailey's is more that slag Old Greg's tipple.

[NickFitz]

One that I'm sure would have made next week's list - looking at the number above I've already read last week

In 1973, I invented Bailey's Irish Cream
One for Cojak / Sue Ellen and especially NorthernLadyUK

I've bought his book on the strength of that

[eek]

One that I'm sure would have made next week's list - looking at the number above I've already read last week

In 1973, I invented Bailey's Irish Cream
One for Cojak / Sue Ellen and especially NorthernLadyUK

[NickFitz]

Another week off from ClientCo, and at least this time I'm not starting it recovering from food poisoning

• The Untold Story of Kim Jong-nam’s Assassination - "Two women had the most audacious task. Killing the brother of the North Korean leader. Right out in the open, using deadly chemical weapons in an international airport. And the craziest thing? They had no idea what they'd gotten into." Detailed account of the remarkable plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un’s brother
  
  
• ’Magnetars’, Soft Gamma Repeaters, and Very Strong Magnetic Fields - More than you realised there was to know about magnetically powered neutron stars: ”The strongest magnetic field that you are ever likely to encounter personally is about 10⁴ Gauss if you have Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan for medical diagnosis. Such fields pose no threat to your health, hardly affecting the atoms in your body. Fields in excess of 10⁹ Gauss, however, would be instantly lethal. Such fields strongly distort atoms, compressing atomic electron clouds into cigar shapes, with the long axis aligned with the field, thus rendering the chemistry of life impossible. A magnetar within 1000 kilometers would thus kill you via pure static magnetism.”
  
  
• The True Story of Star Trek’s First “Green Girl” - "When you think of iconic images of women from Star Trek: The Original Series, the green Orion dancing girl from the first pilot, “The Cage”, (and later the two-part episode “The Menagerie”) has got to be near the top of the list." But there was a lot more to the career of the woman who played her, Susan Oliver.
  
  
• The Secret Underground World Of Singapore - ”Our government bigwigs have always been tirelessly coming up with strategies to make the best use of our most limited resource: land. As a small island city-state with a scarce land, Singapore struggles to accommodate both urban and suburban areas. To put this into perspective, Russia is approximately 24,531 times larger than Singapore!” With limited land area, Singapore has built downwards to a remarkable degree.
  
  
• Diary of a concussion - Elizabeth Lopatto on the experience of suffering a brain injury: "I noticed someone moving above me, and asked her what was happening. I was about to get a CT scan, she told me… I was a science journalist and had written about CT scans but I’d never had one before, I told her. So this was exciting. But as they moved me into the scanner, I wondered: was I a science journalist? I had spoken without thinking. My entire life before the ambulance felt dim and far off. I might as well have been born on the pavement, with the neck brace half on."
  
  
• Sputnik and Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope - Sixty years ago, it was a busy week at the newly-operational radio telescope: ”The year had been a difficult one for Jodrell Bank’s director, Bernard Lovell… The launch of Sputnik helped restore the Observatory’s reputation. The Jodrell Bank telescope was the only facility in the West which could track Sputnik’s launch rocket.”
  
  
• The Story Behind the Chicago Newspaper That Bought a Bar - With corruption rampant in 1970s Chicago, journalist Pam Zekman of the Chicago Sun-Times had an idea: buy a bar, and wait to be shaken down by public officials. ”I think one of the things that amazed us is that these inspectors sold out public safety on the cheap. They were not taking huge amounts. We were told to leave $10 for one inspector, and $25 for another inspector.”
  
  
• Epigrams on Programming, highlighted - Alan J. Perlis of Yale published this list in 1982; it’s hardly dated, except perhaps for one or two items: ”You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.”
  
  
• 'Fancy Believing in the Goblin King' - Paul Magrs’ autistic friend met David Bowie after a screening of Labyrinth in the 1980s: ”He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence. It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist?”
  
  
• Giant Straw Animals Invade Japanese Fields After Rice Harvest And They Are Absolutely Badass - "Fall is a season of harvesting, and festivals to celebrate it are currently taking place all over the world. In Northern Japan, the Wara Art Festival recently rang in the September-October rice season, and it’s a wildly inventive and fun way to repurpose rice straw left over from the harvest."
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!