Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDVIII

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Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDVIII

The foul lurgy that has been afflicting me for a week seems to be easing, but if you don't want to suffer as I have, avoid all human contact, lock yourself in, and experience the outside world solely through the Internet. You could start with this lot:

Why can’t we cure the common cold? - Nicola Davison on science’s long history of failing to achieve a cure for colds, and the new approaches that will, I’m betting, fail just as dismally: ”More than 200 viruses provoke cold-like illness, each one deploying its own peculiar chemical and genetic strategy to evade the body’s defences. It is hard to think of another disease that inspires the same level of collective resignation."
Some Mother’s Boy - Alina Simone: ”In 1921, a teenager died alone in Kentucky and was buried without a name. A century later, a team of sleuths set out to find his identity."
100 Million Years of Decorating Yourself In Junk - Ed Yong on the surprisingly widespread practice of animals adorning themselves with stuff: ”The aptly named decorator crabs, for example, look like walking bundles of algae and seaweed. The larvae of caddisflies live in tubes made of rock, sand, plants, and other underwater detritus, bound by silk. And one grisly species of assassin bug wears a coat made from the corpses of its ant prey.”
Nationalize the Pubs - "One hundred years ago, Britain nationalized hundreds of its pubs — and invented a better drinking culture." It took state intervention during the First World War to turn pubs from dank boozers into salubrious drinking establishments. (The process is not yet complete in some.)
How I Socially Engineer Myself Into High Security Facilities - Sophie Daniel is a pentester for Sincerely Security and a couple of days ago she tweetstormed this account of a recent mission (with the client’s permission), now gathered together on one page: ”Organizations hire me to evaluate their security, which I do by seeing if I can bypass it. During tests I get to do some lockpicking, climb over walls or hop barbed wire fences. I get to go dumpster diving and play with all sorts of cool gadgets that Q would be proud of. But usually, I use what is called social engineering to convince the employees to let me in.”
The Way the World Ends: Not with a Bang But a Paperclip - An interesting look at a game that explores the implications of creating AIs with goals that don’t wholly coincide with our own: ”The idea of a paperclip-making AI didn’t originate with Lantz. Most people ascribe it to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University… In 2003, Bostrom wrote that the idea of a superintelligent AI serving humanity or a single person was perfectly reasonable. But, he added, ‘It also seems perfectly possible to have a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal.’”
Pedways of the City of London - London blogger Diamond Geezer goes for a walk: ”The City of London has… always done its own thing, its planning department especially so, including a pioneering network of elevated walkways in the late 60s and early 70s. The 'pedways' were supposed to become a 30 mile network across the City keeping pedestrians above the traffic, but development ground to a halt and only a fraction were ever built. I've been out in search of what remains.”
Evolution experiment has now followed 68,000 generations of bacteria - A long-running experiment that is revealing much about the nature of evolution: ”On February 24, 1988, Richard Lenski seeded 12 flasks with E. coli and set them up to shake overnight at 37ºC. But he seeded them with only enough nutrients to grow until early the next morning. Every single afternoon since then, he (or someone in his lab) has taken 100 microliters of each bacterial solution, put them into a new flask with fresh growth media, and put the new flask in the shaker overnight… The starvation conditions are a strong pressure for evolution. And the experiment includes its own time machine to track that evolution.”
The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare - There’s gold in them thar affiliate links, and where there’s gold and Americans, there’s lawsuits. ”I called up to Kenny, and he emerged from his apartment to greet me on the stairs. He was tall and good-looking, with a kind of brogrammer affability. Later I’d learn he had studied physics and finance at Washington University in St. Louis, where he rowed crew and was a Beta Theta Phi brother… I asked Kenny about his unusual hobby, figuring that reviewing mattresses was something he did for beer money. But he surprised me by saying that this was what he and his business partner, a guy named Joe Auer, did for a living; their two websites, Mattress Clarity and Slumber Sage, were exclusively dedicated to reviewing mattresses.”
How Nature Creates Uncannily Spherical Boulders - Not just a load of balls: ”Spherical boulders are molded over millions or even billions of years by a natural but long-misunderstood geological phenomenon called concretion.”