Monday Links from the Bench vol. DXXVI

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Monday Links from the Bench vol. DXXVI

Nearly the end of January and still no snow, or not here at any rate. Might just as well carry on ignoring the outside world and get lost in the web instead

What if modern conspiracy theorists are altogether too media literate? - As some grifter publishes a book (crowdfunded to the tune of $150,000) claiming to explain the arrant nonsense of Qanon, Will Partin argues that the problem may be not too little, but too much media literacy: ”The socially acceptable response when faced with a book-length onslaught of brain-breaking conspiracies is to renew calls for media literacy… [Qanon's] biggest enthusiasts are not, strictly speaking, uninformed. If anything, they are seriously over-informed, and Qanon’s very existence might be read as an attempt to impose coherence on the infoglut of contemporary life. The Qanon history of the present is bulltulip, but a considerable portion of the facts it trades in are not.”
Comet from Dark Ages showers Earth with meteoroids - ”A bright comet described in a circa 553 A.D. book, "Histories of the Wars", may have been responsible for a brief and unexpected meteor shower in April 2019.” Explanation of how the CAMS project tracked down the source of this small meteor shower.
Ravenous wild goats ruled this island for over a century. Now, it's being reborn. - How the ecosystem of Redonda, part of Antigua, was saved from destruction by invasive species: ”For many people, ‘rewilding’ brings to mind a quiet and passive process, like stepping away from a garden to let the natural weeds back in. For the Redonda Restoration Programme, rewilding has been a more complicated journey involving helicopters, goats wrapped in plastic, mountaineers armed with rat poison, and protective gear made out of pool noodles and yoga pants.”
An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience - ”We’re mapping the brain in amazing detail—but our brain can’t understand the picture.” It was thought that connectomics, the science of mapping the connections in the brain, would let us understand how it works. But will it?
Large Ocean Art 2019 Winning Images - Cool photos from the Underwater Photography Guide’s 2019 competition. This interior view of the wreck of the Chrisoula K in the Red Sea is by Tobias Friedrich.
Reverberations - Linus Akesson makes music with SID chips, as used in the C64; this album is of music by J.S. Bach:”It struck me that, at least in theory, organ pipes should generate quite primitive sound waves. If so, how come a church organ doesn't sound like a chip tune, which is also built up from simple waveforms? Well, actually it will, if you remove the church. And if you connect a Commodore 64 home computer to a loudspeaker in a large hall, it will sound like an organ. So the music on this album is not performed on a pipe organ. Instead, what you hear is the sound of one or two SID chips (controlled by a Commodore 64), enhanced by a convolution reverb to simulate church acoustics.”
Synthesis of a Vocal Sound from the 3,000 year old Mummy, Nesyamun ‘True of Voice’ - You may have already seen this story as it’s had a lot of coverage over the past week, but here’s the actual paper: ”In [his coffin inscriptions], Nesyamun asks that his soul receives eternal sustenance, is able to move around freely and to see and address the gods as he had in his working life. Therefore his documented wish to be able to speak after his death, combined with the excellent state of his mummified body, made Nesyamun the ideal subject for the ‘Voices from the Past’ project for which his body was re-examined using state-of the-art CT scanning equipment.”
You Can’t Keep Your Parents’ Skulls - ”Under U.S. law, it’s nearly impossible to get permission to decapitate and de-flesh a relative’s remains.” Note that Caitlin Doughty is talking about U.S. law, so maybe you can do it here in the UK. If that’s so, there’s hope yet for this Redditor’s husband: ”My (36F) husband (41M) has some disturbing requests for after he's passed away.”
Trumpton Firemen Facts - All the FAQs about the firemen of Trumpton: ”Q. Is it true they never put out a fire? A. Yes, it's true. Fire is particularly tricky to represent using stop motion animation -especially when coupled with the sort of time and budgetry constraints the Trumptonshire animators faced.So it was simply avoided.”
Tutto Lamette and Razor Blade Wrappers Collection - Razor blade packaging is a matter of such wide interest that there are not one but TWO sites devoted to it! One is Italian (its name translates to “All Blades”), and the other is Russian - though the latter is also available in French, as well as the English version linked to