Monday Links from the Bench vol. DXII

[BrilloPad]

Quanta Magazine

Reminds me why I gave up pure maths just as soon as I could.

[Ploptimus]

[*]SQL Murder Mystery - A fun way to brush up on your database querying skills: ”There's been a Murder in SQL City! The SQL Murder Mystery is designed to be both a self-directed lesson to learn SQL concepts and commands and a fun game for experienced SQL users to solve an intriguing crime.” I’d recommend expanding the schema diagram rather than relying on querying the schema directly, but you might want to start with the latter to get a feel for how SQLite does things

I did this one for funzies, sad I know, but feel I cheated myself by just reverse engineering the trigger rather than solving

[Zigenare]

The lost art of "Paste-Up"?

That's how I send my love letters!

[DoctorStrangelove]

Liked the calutron thing, gave up on time crystals.

Very impressed that the magnets in the calutron run at 4.5MW, 600V and 7500A.

Must be a bitch to turn those on & off.

[NickFitz]

512. 2⁹. 0x200. 01000. 0b1000000000

• The dangerously cheesy collectible Cheetos market - ”Dozens of ‘rare Cheetos,’ shaped like everything from Donald Trump to a squirrel, are up for sale on eBay. But who’s buying?” Who indeed? I mean, look at this garbage
  
  
  
  
  
• With Category Theory, Mathematics Escapes From Equality - Those wacky mathematicians are at it again: ”Two monumental works have led many mathematicians to avoid the equal sign. Their goal: Rebuild the foundations of the discipline upon the looser relationship of ‘equivalence.’ The process has not always gone smoothly.”
  
  
• Preparative Scale Mass Spectrometry: A Brief History of the Calutron - The calutron was a variant of the cyclotron originally used to separate uranium isotopes for the first atomic bomb. ”Every atom of the 42 kg of ²³⁵U used in the first uranium bomb had passed through at least one stage of calutron separation… Despite the fact that the events recounted below occurred more than 50 years ago, complete details of how this astounding feat was accomplished cannot be obtained by the public.”
  
  
• John J. Audubon’s Birds of America - ”John James Audubon's Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration. Nearly 200 years later, the Audubon prints are coming to life once again, thanks to our vibrant digital library.” In other words, amazing pictures of birds. This is the black vulture:
  
  
  
  
  
• SQL Murder Mystery - A fun way to brush up on your database querying skills: ”There's been a Murder in SQL City! The SQL Murder Mystery is designed to be both a self-directed lesson to learn SQL concepts and commands and a fun game for experienced SQL users to solve an intriguing crime.” I’d recommend expanding the schema diagram rather than relying on querying the schema directly, but you might want to start with the latter to get a feel for how SQLite does things
  
  
• The Exquisite Precision Of Time Crystals - ”Time crystals… are states of matter whose patterns repeat at set intervals of time rather than space. They are systems in which time symmetry is spontaneously broken. The notion of time crystals was first proposed in 2012, and in 2017 scientists discovered the first new materials that fully fit this category.” The materials scientists are getting even weirder than the mathematicians nowadays
  
  
• How Magazine Pages Were Created Before Computers: A Veteran of the London Review of Books Demonstrates the Meticulous, Manual Process - This is how we did things before desktop publishing: ”Typewriters. Letters covered in blotches of Tipp-Ex, for which the office name was 'eczema.' No screens; hand-drawn maps for layout; tins of Cow Gum.”
  
  
  
  
  
• Discovery of Bronze Age Warrior’s Kit Sheds New Light on an Epic Prehistoric Battle - ”A knife, chisel, arrowheads, and other gear belonging to a Bronze Age warrior have been uncovered on a 3,300-year-old battlefield in Germany… Over 30 items belonging to a single warrior were found clumped together under a river bank in Germany’s Tollense Valley—the site of a violent conflict involving potentially thousands of warriors some 3,300 years ago.” For more info, the paper describing the finds is also available: Lost in combat? A scrap metal find from the Bronze Age battlefield site at Tollense
  
  
• The world in which IPv6 was a good design - Avery Pennarun describes the evolution of networking technology, and the innumerable compromises and complexities that ended up getting rolled up into IPv6: ”Why is IPv6 such a complicated mess compared to IPv4? Wouldn't it be better if it had just been IPv4 with more address bits? But it's not, oh goodness, is it ever not. So I started asking around. Here's what I found.”
  
  
• Comic Book Cartography - John Hilgart brings together all kinds of maps and diagrams from comic books. Here’s the Batcave as seen in 1968:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!