Monday Links from the Bench vol. DXX

[DoctorStrangelove]

On my stagger up the hill there's a chunk of rock that looks very much as if something has eaten holes in it.

I wonder if those worms are rather more common than one might imagine.

On the microcode thing, the floppy diskette was designed as a means of loading microcode into something when the 370 came along.

All 80k of it.

Floppy Disk Formats, Standards and Geometry

[quackhandle]

Enjoyed the story about the Coder, I remember few people like that back in Uni on the Computing Course, proper oddballs, but quite gifted at coding.

qh

[BrilloPad]

That has made me far happier than it should have

But that is not MrMS with you in the picture! Wait until MrMS finds out!

[mudskipper]

Some lovely pics in here, including this one of mudskipper and friend

That has made me far happier than it should have

[NickFitz]

For those that don't realise DXX = 520

Which means it's the 10th birthday of Monday links...

Kind of, in that it’s the 520th; but the first was on 4th January 2010, so I’d say the true tenth birthday is the first Monday of the New Year

[GhostofTarbera]

Happy burnday


Sent from my iPhone using Contractor UK Forum

[eek]

For those that don't realise DXX = 520

Which means it's the 10th birthday of Monday links...

[NickFitz]

Sunset’s started getting later now, though sunrise continues to also get later for a while after the Winter Solstice next Sunday. You can find out when things will improve at both ends of the day at your location with Sunrise and Sunset Calculator

• The Influencer and the Hit Man - Getting hold of the right domain name can be hard, but here’s one approach: ”He sat down, the man opened up his MacBook Pro, and Deyo felt the gun move from his spine to the rear of his skull, the metal hard on his scalp. ‘Okay, mother****er,’ Deyo recalled him saying. ‘GoDaddy.com.’”
  
  
• Sweet! Sugars found in meteorites for the first time - ”Scientists have just announced they have, for the first time, detected biological sugars in meteorites! This includes ribose, arabinose, xylose, and lyxose. Ribose is particularly important, because it's a key part of RNA — ribonucleic acid — which is critical in the formation of life on Earth” Coming soon: Sugarbowls of the Gods by Derek von Heineken
  
  
• Why Does Enceladus Have Stripes at its South Pole? - ”Saturn’s moon Enceladus has captivating scientists ever since the Voyager 2 mission passed through the system in 1981. The mystery has only deepened since the arrival of the Cassini probe in 2004, which included the discovery of four parallel, linear fissures around the southern polar region.”
  
  
• Scientists Find a Shipworm That Eats, and Lives Inside, Rocks - Life always finds a way: ”Shipworms got their name because they bore through wood that’s in contact with water, eating the material… But Lithoredo abatanica nibbled its way down a different evolutionary path. This shipworm eats rock.”
  
  
• Leopard slugs mate in the most beautifully bizarre way – and nobody knows why - HT to lady muck for this hot slug-related action: ”Both slugs then push out and entwine two overly-sized penises from openings on the side of their head, before exchanging sperm that may later fertilise each of their eggs. Or, perhaps be eaten. Eventually, one slug crawls off and the other follows, eating the mucus trapeze as it goes.”
  
  
  
  
  
• The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Virtuoso Coder - ”Eric noticed a peculiar stonelike object lying on the ground. He knelt down for a closer look and saw that it was a human skull, its jawbone missing but its upper teeth still a healthy shade of white… A few feet deeper into the forest, the crime scene unit found two black sneakers, a dark shirt, and a pair of black pants with a vine threaded through its belt loops… Inside a pants pocket was a wallet containing a wad of waterlogged cash, rewards cards from Subway and a chain of erotic boutiques, and an Ohio state ID for Jerold Christoper Haas, born September 30, 1975.” A sad tale of addiction and cryptocurrency, among other things
  
  
• Inside the Outrageously Prestigious World of Falcon Influencers - ”For the aficionados who drop millions on high-quality birds, it's a head-**** (literally) to compete against some of the most powerful men in the world.” With falcons being such a popular thing with the wealthy elites of the Middle East, there’s money in them thar birds.
  
  
• Down on the Body Farm: Unlocking the Forensic Secrets of Decaying Corpses - The famous body farm is at the forefront of a new approach to forensic investigation of unexplained deaths: ”To an outsider, the scene might look like a serial killer’s dumping ground, but it was just another day at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Anthropology Research Facility… The dead woman was there to play her part in a developing frontier in forensic crime solving: analyzing and interrogating the suite of trillions of microorganisms and other creatures that are witness to our deaths.”
  
  
• TROS: How IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers - Ken Shirriff with yet another weird and wonderful piece of old computer technology: ”I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unusual storage mechanism used a stack of Mylar sheets to hold 15,360 bits, equivalent to 1920 bytes. By modern standards, this is an absurdly small amount of data, but in 1964, semiconductor read-only memory chips weren't available, so using Mylar sheets for storage was a reasonable solution. In this blog post, I explain how the TROS module worked and its role in the success of the IBM System/360.”
  
  
• Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition - ”The Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition celebrates the power of photography in capturing scientific phenomena happening all around us, and the role great images play in making science accessible to a wide audience.” Some lovely pics in here, including this one of mudskipper and friend
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!