Monday Links from the Bench vol. CDLXXXV

[BrilloPad]

Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply - ”By chopping up large numbers into smaller ones, researchers have rewritten a fundamental mathematical speed limit.” It seems this advance is unlikely to influence modern processor design much, but if you need to do multiplication on a 6502 it might come in handy

An addendum for those who love mafs!
Mathematicians discover new way of multiplying large numbers
The findings may represent the 'fastest multiplication algorithm mathematically possible'
Mathematicians discover new way of multiplying large numbers | The Independent

[BrilloPad]

Pay up or I release the rest of them...

Thats not me. That is PC.....

[northernladuk]

I do hope there were only 2 and there is not another set going round.....

Pay up or I release the rest of them...

[BrilloPad]

Super set this week. I particularly like the blood, multiplication and diary ones.

The diary one reminded me that in 1988 I left a job at a bank. My leaving do was at a pub a few days before I was due to leave. There was a stripogram and I was put in a compromising position. I remember flash photography. On my last day someone showed me the photos. I ripped them up and the negatives - much to their disgust.

I rejoined in 1990. The bank was selling desks and someone working for me(who joined in 1989) bought a desk. They took the desk apart - and some photos of me being compromised were found. There were 2 cameras.

I do hope there were only 2 and there is not another set going round.....

[Paddy]

La Petite Mélancolie; women had pubic hair in the old days.

[NickFitz]

This year's like waiting for a bus but with Bank Holidays: nothing for ages, but soon three will turn up in rapid succession. Until then, you'll just have to skive off by reading this lot:

• How Does a Person Lose Track of Their Diary? - ”Stumbling upon someone’s lost journal in a used book store leads Sophie Lucido Johnson down a path she couldn’t have expected.”
  
  
  
  
  
• Hubble lights up Saturn’s aurorae - Phil Plait on observing Saturn's equivalent of the Northern Lights: ”I noticed that on the Hubble page for this image it says the wavelength was at 148 nm. Hmmm, that surprised me. But as it happens I worked on STIS, the camera used to take these observations, so I have some familiarity with how it operated.”
  
  
• Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply - ”By chopping up large numbers into smaller ones, researchers have rewritten a fundamental mathematical speed limit.” It seems this advance is unlikely to influence modern processor design much, but if you need to do multiplication on a 6502 it might come in handy
  
  
• Muralist Kitt Bennett Paints Pavement With Sprawling Giants - ”From parking lots to skate parks, Melbourne-based artist Kitt Bennett paints large illustrative murals on an unconventional surface: the ground. The almost literal “street” art is best seen from a bird’s eye view and features people, objects, and skeletons that contort around their respective spaces as if they fell from the sky.”
  
  
  
  
  
• We Tried To Find 10 BuzzFeed Employees Just Like Cops Did For The Golden State Killer - Interesting experiment in using genetics to identify people: ”My editor Virginia Hughes and I conjured up an experiment: She would recruit BuzzFeed employees to play the role of ‘suspects’ and get their DNA tested with a company used by genealogy enthusiasts. She’d then download their DNA profiles, containing data on hundreds of thousands of genetic markers, and send the files to me labeled with randomly chosen fake names. Then I’d play genealogy ‘detective’ and try to figure out who they really were.”
  
  
• A Geological “Orrery” Could Reveal Planetary Dynamics in Deep Time - Using ancient Earth rocks to calculate the relative positions of the planets millions of years ago: ”As he continued to analyze the sediment cores from the Newark Basin, ‘it became very obvious that there was a 1.75-million-year cycle,’ Olsen says… By 1999, Olsen and Kent were able to show that the Earth-Mars cycle had shifted over time, and currently has a period of 2.4 million years.”
  
  
• Webcomics: an oral history - ”It can be hard to remember how primitive the internet landscape was in the late ‘90s, the era when webcomics came of age… Webcomics creators often went online after being rejected by newspaper syndicates, gatekeeper conglomerates that grew increasingly conservative in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The best ones grew into beloved phenomenons, and the nascent funny T-shirt industry allowed many artists to make a living on daily cartoons throughout the 2000s.”
  
  
  
  
  
• How Russia Fell in Love with Candy Bars Made of Blood - ”Many Soviet children grew up loving the sweetness, texture, and slight metallic twang of Hematogen bars—without knowing what was in them.”
  
  
• Researchers at This Base in Antarctica Eat Better Than You Do - Other foodstuffs are available, at least sometimes: ”In July of 2018, Lewis Georgiades ran out of mayonnaise… At a latitude of 67 degrees south, July is the dead of winter. Georgiades had tried to warn his diners as they piled mayo high on their plates. They didn’t listen. The next food delivery was three months away.”
  
  
• La Petite Mélancolie - ”killing time with beauty” This blog forms a huge collection of early photography. (Occasionally a bit NSFW, if W is likely to get in a snit about a model posing in the nip 109 years ago.) This 1908 photograph by Isidor Hirsch is of Tilla Durieux, a Viennese actress who became a prominent figure in the Berlin art world of the 1920s. (Slightly OT, though not really: one way you can tell a site like this is a labour of love is that all the images have detailed, meaningful filenames rather than stuff like “img4098”; this one is called “portrait-of-the-actress-tilla-durieux-by-isidor-hirsch-1908.jpg”.)
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!