Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCXXXII

[DoctorStrangelove]

JLC PCB <-- All your etching needs without the dodgy chemicals :-)

I no longer have a requirement for etching pcbs.

It went away due to lack of innerest.

[NickFitz]

I've read them all. It's very formulaic and not particularly challenging but I do find them un-put-down-able. His earlier ones are by far the best, e.g. One Shot.

Sometimes formulaic and unchallenging but unputdownable is just the ticket. Thanks!

[Snooky]

I I’ve never actually read any of these, but they sound pretty good - maybe I should give them a go

I've read them all. It's very formulaic and not particularly challenging but I do find them un-put-down-able. His earlier ones are by far the best, e.g. One Shot.

[Zigenare]

Back in the day, up in Ye Olde Sloughe of Desponde before they condemned my etching machine, I found the design for the Vocoder thing that Mr Young used, with some demented idea of building one.

Needless to say, that's as far as it ever got.

Mostly because it's really fecking complicated IIRC.

JLC PCB <-- All your etching needs without the dodgy chemicals :-)

[DoctorStrangelove]

I saw Neil Young at Wembley when he was touring that album. Phenomenal gig; the band included, along with Nils Lofgren, members of Crazy Horse, Buffalo Springfield, Manassas, and others

Back in the day, up in Ye Olde Sloughe of Desponde before they condemned my etching machine, I found the design for the Vocoder thing that Mr Young used, with some demented idea of building one.

Needless to say, that's as far as it ever got.

Mostly because it's really fecking complicated IIRC.

[d000hg]

Which you'd expect on a game where you have to guess the country surely

Sorry, North Africa

[northernladuk]

Yeah, it won't let me guess "Africa".

Which you'd expect on a game where you have to guess the country surely

[NickFitz]

Yeah, it won't let me guess "Africa".
And it doesn't have the same countries as Google Maps.
And I thought I was close, then tried somewhere 2 continents away and that was equally close

From the bottom of the help page (accessed via the ? in a circle at the top): "Learn the what qualifies as a valid country in this game."

Shame about the spurious "the", but the linked article explains what you need to know to play

Edited to add: there's also a closed GitHub issue on the subject. I'll start an issue about the spurious "the" and submit a PR to fix it

Edited again to add: countries are hard. Have a look at this issue about Denmark

Edited one more time: my pull request to fix the stray "the" has been accepted, merged, and deployed

[d000hg]

Happily there's little chance of me becoming addicted, because I'm staggeringly ignorant of countries renamed since Siam became Thailand!

Yeah, it won't let me guess "Africa".
And it doesn't have the same countries as Google Maps.
And I thought I was close, then tried somewhere 2 continents away and that was equally close

[OwlHoot]

OK, you've got me on Globle now.

Happily there's little chance of me becoming addicted, because I'm staggeringly ignorant of countries renamed since Siam became Thailand!

[WTFH]

OK, you've got me on Globle now.

[NickFitz]

Yamaha DX7 Sample and Hold.

I saw Neil Young at Wembley when he was touring that album. Phenomenal gig; the band included, along with Nils Lofgren, members of Crazy Horse, Buffalo Springfield, Manassas, and others

[DoctorStrangelove]

Yamaha DX7 Sample and Hold.

[NickFitz]

If you should fancy a break from the fake snow of the Winter Olympics, this lot might help you pass the time

• The Shadow and The Ghost - Christine Grimaldi uncovers a tragic tale buried in her family history: ”Nanny, whose real name was Genevieve ‘Jennie’ Grimaldi, née Otranto, was haunted her whole life by the specter of Josephine Carbone, a woman as cruel as she was charismatic. Carbone was better known, to both her followers and her critics, as Reverend Mother… With government records and newspaper clippings, the memories of the few churchgoers who are still alive and the descendants of those who aren’t, I pieced together the narrative of Reverend Mother’s rise to power and her eventual downfall. I learned the stories of families who, like the Otrantos, were all but destroyed by La Cappella dei Miracoli.”
• Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Snowflakes - ”Kenneth Libbrecht is that rare person who, in the middle of winter, gleefully leaves Southern California for a place like Fairbanks, Alaska, where wintertime temperatures rarely rise above freezing. There, he dons a parka and sits in a field with a camera and a piece of foam board, waiting for snow… Now, Libbrecht’s work on snow has crystallized in a new model that attempts to explain why snowflakes and other snow crystals form the way they do.” The article contains links not only to Libbrecht’s paper, but also to his 540-page monograph detailing the full extent of our knowledge of snow crystals
• Earth Has a New Asteroid Companion, but Not for Long - Depends how you define “long”: ”The Trojan asteroid 2020 XL5 is projected to linger in our planet’s vicinity for the next 4,000 years.”
• Astronomers find the first rogue black hole wandering the Milky Way! - ”Exploiting a bizarre property of black holes and gravity, astronomers may have made the first unambiguous detection of an isolated stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy, including a measurement of its mass and distance! If this pans out it will be the first rogue stellar-mass black hole found anywhere that wasn't detected via violently eating a star or some other object.” A bit further away than the asteroid, thankfully
• Globle - If you’ve already done Wordle for the day, have a go at this geographical version: ”Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.”
• Over 100 different species made this 2,200-year-old shipwreck home, study finds - ”Ship's ram from First Punic War serves as ‘ecological memory’ of 2 millennia of underwater life.” The Punic Wars were the ones between Rome and Carthage.
• The Surprisingly Messy Culture Wars Within The New York Times Crossword Puzzle - ”In the 1970s Will Shortz submitted a crossword to the New York Times with a word so scandalous that the editor rejected it. The word: bellybutton.” Now Shortz is the crossword editor, and also has to deal with tricky questions concerning which words are acceptable.
• 'Between real and mythic': an oral history of Jack Reacher - ”Redundant on the cusp of his forties, Lee Child took a wild gamble – and won. Twenty-five years after the release of Killing Floor, the creator of Jack Reacher reflects on his debut alongside the team who published his first novel.” I’ve never actually read any of these, but they sound pretty good - maybe I should give them a go
• Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part V: the output circuitry - Ken Shirriff returns to the classic synth, this time looking at the bit that makes the sound come out: ”It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produce complex, harmonically-rich sounds. In this blog post, I look inside its custom sound chip and explain how the chip's output circuitry works. You might expect it's just a digital output fed into a digital-to-analog converter, but there's much more to it than just that.”
• The Mindfield Cemetery - ”Neighboring the Haywood County courthouse in Brownsville, Tennessee, an imposing structure of gray-painted steel lords over the bucolic landscape. Under perpetual construction for decades, this half-acre construction–with a centerpiece taller than Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers–has been dubbed The Mindfield Cemetery by its maker, Billy Tripp, who plans to be interred there.” One way to pass the time, I suppose The structure can also be seen on Street View.
  

Happy invoicing!