Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDLXXIX

[Mordac]

Great set of links NF. Gonna have to set some time out later to read all of them.

I do notice a common re-occurrence of bank robbery links. You researching Plan B or something?

I guess we all get a bit nostalgic for the days when one could actually rob a bank. Now the banks have found ways around that possibility, mostly by not actually having any money. Meanwhile they've been perfecting many and varied ways to rob us.

[NigelJK]

Daddy was a Bank Robber,
But he never hurt nobody.
He just wanted to live that way,
And loved to steal your money.

[NickFitz]

Great set of links NF. Gonna have to set some time out later to read all of them.

I do notice a common re-occurrence of bank robbery links. You researching Plan B or something?

Bank robberies are always interesting. That was the entire premise of The Sweeney, and look how popular that was

[northernladuk]

Great set of links NF. Gonna have to set some time out later to read all of them.

I do notice a common re-occurrence of bank robbery links. You researching Plan B or something?

[NickFitz]

Busy morning today; the car has passed its MOT, and hopefully the blood they sucked out of me at the GP's will also pass its tests. Now back to the important stuff: wasting time on the Internet

• The Desperado - ”Paying for his breakfast would require the last of the cash in his wallet. After that, he had only $1.75 left in a Prosperity Bank checking account, which he’d opened roughly eight years earlier. But Averill wasn’t worried about money. The bank was less than a block away, and when he finished eating he was going to rob it.” Ciara O'Rourke meets a one-footed almost-blind bank robber.
  
  
• An epically erupting star has carved a truly GIGANTIC hole in space - ”I do love a good space explosion… But then I read about an event recently … and after twenty minutes of leaning forward over my monitor scrutinizing several research papers, I fell back into my chair, eyes wide, neck hair standing up, and under my breath I muttered, ‘Holy &%^#%$@.’” Phil Plait gets excited over the recurring nova M31N 2008-12a.
  
  
• How Disney Built Star Wars, in real life - Matthew Panzarino on the construction of Disney’s new theme park: ”What is being built here has little parallel in terms of immersion and ambition in an amusement park or out… Before they could begin to build, though, Imagineers had to build the tools to do so.”
  
  
• 400,000 pieces of LEGO were used to build this full-size volkswagen - A T2 Transporter, not a Golf: ”the model was built around a steel-tube frame, can accomodate the weight of two adults, and features cleverly designed, retro-inspired interiors.”
  
  
  
  
  
• The DNA of Iceland's First Known Black Man, Recreated From His Living Descendants - Sarah Zhang: ”Hans Jonatan was born into slavery on a Caribbean sugar plantation, and he died in a small Icelandic fishing village… No one knows how he got there. No one knows where in Iceland he is buried today. But the story of the first black man in Iceland, as far as it is known, has endured in local lore, passed down from his Icelandic wife and two children to hundreds of descendants since his death in 1827.”
  
  
• A World Without Clouds - Natalie Wolchover on evidence that previous episodes of global warming led to cloud loss that in turn led to mass extinctions: ”Violent storms ravaged the planet; the geologic record indicates flash floods and protracted droughts. As Kennett put it, ‘Earth was triggered, and all hell broke loose.’”
  
  
• The Hidden History of Holocaust Money - ”The very existence of Holocaust currencies—from the notes printed by Nazi authorities and distributed in Jewish ghettos to the “coupons” or “camp money” used by prisoners in concentration camps—has seldom been investigated in studies of the era… Then, in the spring of 2015, a collection of bills and coins found their way to the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, having been donated by Robert Messing, a Clark alumnus and an amateur numismatist.”
  
  
  
  
  
• Bandit - ”I was with my dad the first time I stole something: a little booklet of baby names. I was seven… I do remember an acidic boiling in my chest and a rinse of sweaty cold on my skin, a disgust with my own desire and what it did, how awful all of us felt now because of me. I never stole again until I was a teenager, when he was in prison.” Molly Brodak on growing up as the daughter of a bank robber.
  
  
• Ong's Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real - ”On a sunny morning in early 2000, Joseph Matheny woke up to find conspiracy theorists camped out on his lawn again… He already knew what they wanted. They wanted to know the truth about Ong’s Hat. They wanted the secret to interdimensional travel.” Jed Oelbaum on one of the earliest Internet conspiracy theories.
  
  
• Библиотека: Книги на «Тогда» - A library of Soviet children’s books. This is Через полюс в Америку, or Through the pole to America, by George Baidukov.
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!