Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DXCIII

[OwlHoot]

When I was a kid, my father had one trick that he would occasionally show me.

He would put a silver milk bottle top on a corner of a table, his hand under the corner, and then slap the top.

Mysteriously, he would then show me the top in his lower hand, and he definitely hadn't palmed it or slid his hand in any way.

From those days to this, I have never worked out how he did it, and he would never explain it!

[DoctorStrangelove]

How disappointing: I thought it included dear old Edward Teller's work on the Super.

Ho hum.

What would we have done without Q-DOS?

At least it has a copy command rather than PIP.

I'll never look at trees in quite the same way ever again.

[_V_]

Reading about all the magicians lies, misdirection, sleight of hand, and trickery, I have come to the conclusion Boris's govt use the same tactics in these elections.

[NickFitz]

Anther busy day, but just found time to gather this lot together so you can remain un-busy

• The Search for a Ranger Who Was Lost and Never Found - ”Investigators, family, and friends are still trying to close the case of Paul Fugate, a naturalist at Arizona’s Chiricahua National Monument who vanished without a trace in 1980. What keeps them motivated to stick with a mystery that may be unsolvable?”
• Quantum Astronomy Could Create Telescopes Hundreds of Kilometers Wide - ”Astronomers hope to use innovations from the subatomic world to construct breathtakingly large arrays of optical observatories.” The truth is out there
• Teller Reveals His Secrets - Some interesting ideas about psychology and perception: ”The smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn & Teller writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind.”
• There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) - Trees aren't real: ”’Trees’ are not a coherent phylogenetic category. On the evolutionary tree of plants, trees are regularly interspersed with things that are absolutely, 100% not trees.”
• e.e. cummings free poetry archive - ”A collection of the work of Edward Estlin Cummings, as it enters the public domain. Three books are now available.” This is governed by US copyright laws relating to date of publication, so more of cummings’ work will become available over the years
• The complete history of the IBM PC, part one: The deal of the century, The complete history of the IBM PC, part two: The DOS empire strikes - ”Bill Gates, mysterious deaths, and the business machine that sparked a home revolution.” The story of the machine that made Microsoft.
• Cicadas Have an Existential Problem - Cicadas are entirely dependent on the bacteria that I’ve inside them, yet those bacteria face difficulties because of the creatures’ years-long hibernation periods: ”Despite appearances, that individual cicada will be a swarm unto itself—the insect and a community of organisms living inside it. Their lives have been so tightly entwined that they cannot survive alone. Their fates have been so precariously interlinked that their future is uncertain. And their relationship is so unusual that when John McCutcheon first stumbled upon it in 2008, he had no idea what he had found.”
• “The Mark of the Beast”: Georgian Britain’s Anti-Vaxxer Movement - The original vaccine-haters: ”Ox-faced children, elderly women sprouting horns, and cloven minds — all features attributed to Edward Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox. Introducing us to the original anti-vaxxers, Erica X Eisen explores the “vacca” in the first-ever vaccine: its bovine origins and the widespread worry that immunity came with beastly side effects.”
• My Colony Memoir - David A. Smith wrote a classic game for the Mac; here, he reminisces about games development in the early days of the industry: ”My first attempts at this were on an Apple II using simple pictures where you could move through the world by loading a new image based upon the user's decisions. I realized pretty quickly that this approach would simply not scale very well if only due to the limitations of space on a floppy disk. In a way, I turned to 3D as a compression technology… Once I decided on the technology, I began the process of ‘inventing’ it.”
• Roger Vail - ”In 1970, Vail began photographing carnivals and their thrill rides with his 8 x 10 inch view camera. His pictures were made in the evening hours with long exposures times, resulting in extended moments which track the momentum of the ride with a sense wonderment that is both tangible and otherworldly.” This is Wave Swinger #2 from 2001
  
  

Happy invoicing!