Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Lockdown vol. DLVII

[Uncle Albert]

I saw an elephant! But it was standing very still so could have been a rock...

[wattaj]

The camera has been moved! Nothing there at the moment

Yes, sorry about that. I'll refund later.

[ladymuck]

The camera has been moved! Nothing there at the moment.

EDIT: back to the watering hole again. This has more going on than Eastenders ever did.

[Andy2]

A herd of elephants have just arrived. 15 of them and with little ones

[Andy2]

There's an elephant standing in the water at the moment. The camera's on night vision so its eyes glow, and you can see when it blinks

I put it on my TV while working from home. Its like working near that watering hole. Mucho Gracias.

[OwlHoot]

..[*]A Bizarre Spacecraft 'Flyby Anomaly' Has Been Baffling Scientists for 30 Years - ”Earth and Jupiter appear to give some passing spacecraft a speed boost, a persistent anomaly so mysterious and unexplained that its very existence is controversial.” Probably something to do with time again. ...

The snag with modified general relativity explanations is that the tiny effects for a spaceship passing a planet would presumably show up far more obviously in extreme-gravity situations such as orbiting neutron star binary pairs or black hole accretion rings.

FWIW, I reckon it may be some tiny interaction between the electronics on the spacecraft and the magnetic field which Earth, Jupiter, and the Sun all have. It would be interesting to know if the effect occurs with flybys of Mars, which has no magnetic field. (The article doesn't mention Mars, but then maybe there have been no Mars flybys.)

[NickFitz]

All i saw was a few rabbits. I want my money back.

They all gone beddy byes

There's an elephant standing in the water at the moment. The camera's on night vision so its eyes glow, and you can see when it blinks

[ladymuck]

All i saw was a few rabbits. I want my money back.

They all gone beddy byes

[Andy2]

There is somebody there who moves the camera to keep them in view, at least some of the time, but sometimes they wander off behind stuff for a bit (the elephants, and maybe the camera operator too)

Some giraffes have just shown up, with one elephant keeping an eye on them…

All i saw was a few rabbits. I want my money back.

[ladymuck]

• The Hidden Science Behind 2020's Biggest Video Games - ”From the parasitic fungus in ‘The Last of Us Part II’ to plant genetics in ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons,’ examples of real-life science in gaming might be right under your nose.”

The video referenced in this article - where a teacher uses Half Life: Alyx to teach 6th grade trigonometry is pretty cool

Let's Play: Angle Vocabulary Review (in Half Life: Alyx) - Supplementary, Vertical and Complementary - YouTube

[NickFitz]

I saw an elephant! But it was standing very still so could have been a rock...

There is somebody there who moves the camera to keep them in view, at least some of the time, but sometimes they wander off behind stuff for a bit (the elephants, and maybe the camera operator too)

Some giraffes have just shown up, with one elephant keeping an eye on them…

[ladymuck]

I saw an elephant! But it was standing very still so could have been a rock...

[NickFitz]

I assume the news is all about people transmitting coronavirus to one another at the seaside, but sensible people like you will doubtless want to stay safe at home and read this kind of thing instead

• A Pandemic Journey That Puts Odysseus to Shame - The perils of getting home when a global pandemic starts while you're on an Arctic expedition: ”One scientist started in the Arctic Ocean and ended up crossing the Russia-Finland border on a folding bicycle procured in Germany.”
  
  
• The dance of Neptune's water sprite moons - Phil Plait explains the oddly interlaced orbits of Naiad and Thalassa: ”If both these moons orbited in the same plane they’d pass less than 2000 km from each other. Over time, their gravitational interaction with each other, feeble as it may be, would likely force them into different orbits. So how can they be in the orbits they are?”
  
  
• The Hidden Science Behind 2020's Biggest Video Games - ”From the parasitic fungus in ‘The Last of Us Part II’ to plant genetics in ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons,’ examples of real-life science in gaming might be right under your nose.”
  
  
• The "palaeontological folklore" of mastodon hair - Mark Witton on a persistent myth concerning the extinct North American pachyderms: ”Nearly all of us will imagine mastodons the same way: that is, covered with a thick layer of brownish hair in a fashion reminiscent of its even more iconic cousin, the woolly mammoth… It might come as a shock, therefore, to learn that the foundation of evidence behind our shaggy mastodons was actually entirely baseless for almost two centuries, and that this widely accepted concept has only gained a small amount of support within our lifetimes.”
  
  
• Africam – Always Live, Always Wild - ”Watch wild animals in the beautiful African bush LIVE and unscripted. Elephants, Lions, Leopards and many more make appearances every day in the remotest of Africa’s locations.” No need to go on holiday when you can watch elephants live from the comfort of your quarantine These elephants are in Tembe, though as it’s live they might be standing behind some trees and you won’t see them:
  
  
  
  
  
• America’s Most Flamboyant Private Eye and the 8,000-Mile Manhunt - ”Jay J. Armes is a legendary and controversial Texan investigator with hooks for hands and six decades chasing criminals. This was his most epic murder case ever.” Plenty of other intriguing tales from his long career in here too.
  
  
• The First Clock In America Failed, And It Helped Revolutionize Physics - ”For nearly three full centuries, the most accurate way that humanity kept track of time was through the pendulum clock… But when the first pendulum clock was brought to the Americas, something bizarre happened.” As always, dealing with time gets very complicated very quickly
  
  
• Elonet - As you’re not stuck in a traffic jam on the M5, you can spend the Bank Holiday familiarising yourself with the early days of Finnish cinema instead: ”Elonet is a database and vod-service provided by The National Audiovisual Institute KAVI. KAVI preserves films and film-related materials as well as radio and television programming. KAVI also restores and digitizes Finnish film heritage, and disseminates knowledge about audiovisual culture.” This link is to their stuff with English subtitles, just to ease you in while you get started on Duolingo’s course in Finnish
  
  
• A Bizarre Spacecraft 'Flyby Anomaly' Has Been Baffling Scientists for 30 Years - ”Earth and Jupiter appear to give some passing spacecraft a speed boost, a persistent anomaly so mysterious and unexplained that its very existence is controversial.” Probably something to do with time again.
  
  
• IKEA kataloger - IKEA Museum has put their entire collection of seventy years’ worth of catalogues online, so if you can’t be bothered to go there today you can imagine being there in the Before Days instead. 1970 was very much how you might expect 1970 to have been
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!