Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCXVI

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Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCXVI

If it isn't already raining where you are, it soon will be. But there's no need to go outside anyway when there's this lot to be read

Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part I: Candy Montgomery’s Affair and Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part II: The Killing of Betty Gore - ”Without exception, each man who saw the lifeless body of Betty Gore the night of June 13, 1980, reflexively averted his eyes. Even those who already knew what lay beyond the utility room door were never bold enough to look more than a moment before closing the door. Few looked at the head at all—the sight was too horrible…” From 1984, a tale of jealousy and murder in small-town Texas.
How Wavelets Allow Researchers to Transform, and Understand, Data - ”Many researchers receive their data in the form of continuous signals, meaning an unbroken stream of information evolving over time, such as a geophysicist listening to sound waves bouncing off of rock layers underground, or a data scientist studying the electrical data streams obtained by scanning images. These data can take on many different shapes and patterns, making it hard to analyze them as a whole or to take them apart and study their pieces — but wavelets can help.”
Alain Bombard’s Castaway Cuisine - ”Fish had been the whole of his diet for two weeks previous… Yet Bombard was no castaway; this joyless diet was one he chose. He was an experimentalist determined to prove a theory he had developed: that shipwrecked sailors could survive until rescue or landfall if they drank seawater in moderate amounts.” I can't help wondering if there might have been an easier way to test this hypothesis than crossing the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy
Sim City: An Interview with Stone Librande - Geoff Manaugh talks with one of the more recent versions of Sim City's designers and what he learned about real cities: ”When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store… we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world.”
L'architettura degli Autogrill - Or "The architecture of the Autogrill" which is the Italian version of the motorway service station: ”L’Autogrill Bar Pavesi sulla Milano Torino si trasforma, includendo un’area ristorante e diventando la prima vera area di ristoro per gli automobilisti in Italia. La metamorfosi è completa: l’Italia ha il suo primo vero e proprio Autogrill, quello che servirà da modello per realizzare tutti gli altri.” which, Google Translate informs me, means ”The Pavesi Autogrill Bar on Milano Torino is transformed, including a restaurant area and becoming the first real refreshment area for motorists in Italy. The metamorphosis is complete: Italy has its first real Autogrill, the one that will serve as a model for creating all the others.” They have nothing quite as good as the Forton services tower on the M6, of course
The Murders Down the Hall - ”393 Powell Street was a peaceful home until residents started dying in brutal, mysterious ways.” There goes the neighbourhood
Model Organism - Axolotls are pretty cool: ”They are able to grow back not just their tails, but also legs, arms, even parts of vital organs, including their hearts… The dream for many of the biologists who study them is that we might one day figure out how exactly axolotls do what they do, and maybe even learn to harness that power for humans.”
The Death of Ronald McDonald - What happened to the clown? ”No one raised the alarm when he stopped appearing on British TV screens. No one wept when his cardboard cut-outs were shoved into the stockroom next to the spuds… Ronald McDonald has been missing for seven years.”
Turning vaguely reassuring finite-state machines into regular expressions - An interesting programming challenge: ”There's a Twitter account I like called @happyautomata, which periodically posts randomly-generated finite-state machines. Followers of this account make a hobby of turning the FSMs into regular expressions. This is always possible, because (strictly regular) regular expressions and finite-state machines are exactly equivalent to one another.”
Wildlife Photographer of the Year - The Natural History Museum's latest competition winners: ”These images were awarded for their artistic composition, technical innovation and truthful interpretation of the natural world.” This one is by Zack Clothier, who I assume took it remotely; otherwise, congratulations on the posthumous prize, Zack