Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DLXXVI

[Scoobos]

Populated by desperate LinkedIn 'Influencers', trying to give their sad, delusional lives meaning.

God I hate LinkedIn...

It's so sad, I loved it when it was what it was intended to be. It got me all of my contracts, automatically, worldwide for a good 8 years or so.

I think the social networking generation ruined it. Now, where's me washboard?

[DoctorStrangelove]

Letraset: there used to be, long long ago and far far away, a method of making PCB artwork that used sommat similar to Letraset.

I think I left the last remaining examples up the hill* when we moved down to the docks.

It was, to be fair, bloody awful, and not in a good way.

IIRC you could use it as the actual resist if you were desperate enough.

Thank feck for laser printers and CadStar.


*In other news, streetview has revealed the Wrecked House to be as wrecked as ever, if not more so.

Today I found some of this stuff in a cardboard box I haven't looked in for yonks++.

Amazingly enough it appears to be usable should I turn out to be that desperate.

Though some of it is sticky pads rather than the rub on variety.

[d000hg]

Who else thought 'slap the chicken' was a euphemism...?

"the question turned to whether it would be possible to lightly spank the chicken many thousands of times"

[BrilloPad]

Populated by desperate LinkedIn 'Influencers', trying to give their sad, delusional lives meaning.

God I hate LinkedIn...

+1

[cojak]

I think in times to come, when on present trends there will be essentially no worthwhile work requiring humans, there will be a level of censorious busibody wokeness that puts the efforts of even today's most strident virtue signallers in the shade, because the only largely make-work occupation will be interacting on one "official" way or another with others, sort of like probation officers or psychologists on mega-steroids. It will be a horrible environment for libertarians who just want to be left alone to pursue their own interests!

Populated by desperate LinkedIn 'Influencers', trying to give their sad, delusional lives meaning.

God I hate LinkedIn...

[DoctorStrangelove]

Letraset: there used to be, long long ago and far far away, a method of making PCB artwork that used sommat similar to Letraset.

I think I left the last remaining examples up the hill* when we moved down to the docks.

It was, to be fair, bloody awful, and not in a good way.

IIRC you could use it as the actual resist if you were desperate enough.

Thank feck for laser printers and CadStar.


*In other news, streetview has revealed the Wrecked House to be as wrecked as ever, if not more so.

[OwlHoot]

..[*]In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell, writing in 1932, anticipated my own philosophy of life: ”I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.” ..

I think in times to come, when on present trends there will be essentially no worthwhile work requiring humans, there will be a level of censorious busibody wokeness that puts the efforts of even today's most strident virtue signallers in the shade, because the only largely make-work occupation will be interacting on one "official" way or another with others, sort of like probation officers or psychologists on mega-steroids. It will be a horrible environment for libertarians who just want to be left alone to pursue their own interests!

..[*]When does Columbo first appear in each episode? - ”I made the graph below for a short talk I gave about the TV series ‘Columbo’, which I think is a marvellous programme… I thought it might be nice to put the graph online, which is most of the point of this post, but thought I might add a few notes about why I like Columbo so much.” And why not

I bought the complete 30 (or so) disk set of Columbo for £10 in a charity shop last year, but haven't watched any yet. Maybe now would be a good time to start.

[Mordac]

Who else thought 'slap the chicken' was a euphemism...?

[NickFitz]

The public health authorities' urgent pleas for us to stay in should be easy to comply with when there's stuff like the following to read instead of going out

• The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort Of) Rattled the Scientific Community - ”An improbable tale of how a British maverick harnessed crowdsourced meteorological discoveries to reveal the poetic wonders of the sky.” I included The Cloud Appreciation Society in Monday Links CCC; here, Jon Mooallem hears the story of how it came about from founder Gavin Pretor-Pinney
  
  
• Galaxy-Size Bubbles Discovered Towering Over the Milky Way - New findings concerning the North Polar Spur: ”For decades, astronomers debated whether a particular smudge was close-by and small, or distant and huge. A new X-ray map supports the massive option.”
  
  
• Now We Know Why Platypus Are So Weird - Their Genes Are Part Bird, Reptile, And Mammal - ”The first complete map of a platypus genome has just been released, and it's every bit as strange as you'd expect from a creature with 10 sex chromosomes, a pair of venomous spurs, a coat of fluorescent fur, and skin that 'sweats' milk.” We had a stuffed platypus in the biology department at school, donated some time back in the 1930s, and they really are extremely odd things to see
  
  
• In Praise of Idleness - Bertrand Russell, writing in 1932, anticipated my own philosophy of life: ”I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”
  
  
• Instant Lettering, a Letraset Database. - ”The mission of this project is to educate and promote the fascination of the now obsolete technology of transfer type—most notably Letraset… The goal is to get one sheet of everything!” I was more into letterpress printing myself (I still have an Adana 8-5 hand press), but I was nonetheless fascinated by Letraset sheets like this one of "Information Symbols" :
  
  
  
  
  
• Grabbing hold and letting go: The exploding bolts that bring us to space - Ryan Bradley on the exploding bolts we use to make spacecraft come apart in the right way at the right time: ”The shaking they’re enduring is merely the beginning, intended to simulate the *violence of a launch. The parts also brave hammering, baking, and freezing—24 tests in total. All this before any metal even reaches the launchpad. The abuse ensures not only that the bolts will hold together massive space-faring machines, but that, at the exact right moment, they’ll break neatly apart. More specifically, they’ll explode, strategically jettisoning segments of Orion’s rocketry as they do.”
  
  
• People Are Trying To Cook Chicken By Slapping It After Learning Physics Says It's Possible - ”You can cook a chicken by slapping it at 3725.95 mph, an impossible task by any human means. If you do succeed however, you will not only cook the chicken but also decimate its entire structure, causing a violent explosion.” So, naturally, people are trying
  
  
• When does Columbo first appear in each episode? - ”I made the graph below for a short talk I gave about the TV series ‘Columbo’, which I think is a marvellous programme… I thought it might be nice to put the graph online, which is most of the point of this post, but thought I might add a few notes about why I like Columbo so much.” And why not
  
  
• ‘Reported lost through enemy action’ - Steven Aspinall with a bit of family history: ”My Mother recently gave me my Grandfather’s record books and identity cards from his time in Merchant Navy. Philip Murphy spent the whole of his working life with Cunard, mostly as a cook. This includes service in the World War 2 when the Cunard ships carried troops across the Atlantic.”
  
  
• Dark City: London in the 30s, and Return to the Dark City - ”There was another London, before clean air, before the Blitz, before post-war reconstruction. It was a night time London.” Dave Walker of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Library Service explores photos of London from the 1934 book London Night by John Morrison and Harold Burkedin.
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!