Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCXXXVI

[DoctorStrangelove]

Ah, hedge porn .

First item was found in a tree some 55 years ago, the last was found about 25 years ago (a lot harder than the first one).

I remember spotting some as I was driving back from Letchworth one Friday afternoon in 1993, but I didn't stop to collect it.

[NickFitz]

from the bench?

Oops! I meant to change it but I was interrupted by the ClientGov IT department phoning to get my VPN access set up, and forgot after dealing with all that

[eek]

from the bench?

[NickFitz]

If you're getting worn out by so many things happening so much, try escaping into this lot instead

• The Voyagers - ”Valeri climbed into a motorized kayak that he’d built himself, using walrus hide, a section of bicycle frame, and a small three-horsepower engine. The seawater in which his kayak bobbed was about 34 degrees Fahrenheit that morning, and clotted with blocks of ice the size of school buses. In the kayak’s bow, Valeri had a few five-liter cans of gasoline, some tinned food, a milk jug filled with drinking water, and a single passenger—a little boy.” Valeri and Oleg Minakov were the only people ever to defect from the USSR by boat across the Bering Strait.
• Scientists Watch a Memory Form in a Living Brain - ”A team at the University of Southern California was able to visualize memories forming in the brains of laboratory fish, imaging them under the microscope as they bloomed in beautiful fluorescent greens. From earlier work, they had expected the brain to encode the memory by slightly tweaking its neural architecture. Instead, the researchers were surprised to find a major overhaul in the connections.” Unfortunately, the process involved upsetting the fish; they should have thought of a way to make them remember something nice instead
• How Four Women Destroyed 1,200 Tons of Poison Gas — and Defused a Crisis - ”An obscure Defense Department team had nine months to make a stockpile of Syria’s chemical weapons disappear. In doing the impossible, they helped avert a global showdown and saved untold lives.”
• A look at some military activity in airspace around Ukraine - ”The past week has seen an enormous amount of new and unusual activity in the airspace around Ukraine… If you look closely enough, you’ll spot everything from US Army Blackhawk helicopters to British Royal Air Force RC-135s. So, what are these aircraft, and what are they up to?” From FlightRadar24, some stuff to keep an eye on.
• I’ve collected the first set of data on ‘hedge porn’ – there’s a lot we can learn from people’s experiences - ”I won’t beat about the bush: did you ever find porn in a hedge when you were younger? Depending on your age, that will either be an insanely bizarre question, or you’ll know exactly what I am talking about.” Dr Kate Lister gathers data on the once well-known phenomenon of mucky books cluttering the countryside.
• What Causes the Smell of New & Old Books? - Not the ones found in hedges, just books: ”As with all aromas, the origins can be traced back to a number of chemical constituents, so we can examine the processes and compounds that can contribute to both.”
• Sensor breakthrough paves way for groundbreaking map of world under Earth surface - ”An object hidden below ground has been located using quantum technology—a long-awaited milestone with profound implications for industry, human knowledge and national security.” Sounds like the kind of thing the scanners on the Enterprise do. The full paper is at Nature: Quantum sensing for gravity cartography.
• A Long Bet Pays Off - ”11 years ago, on the site longbets.org, a friendly wager was made between two mavens of the web: Jeremy Keith and Matthew Haughey. The bet, to be revisited a decade and a year later, would be whether the URL of their wager at Long Bets would survive to a point in the semi-distant future. ” Jason Scott on what the bet (which I remember being made) tells us about the longevity of online resources.
• Municipal Dreams: The map of the blog - ”This map provides a guide to all the places and locations covered in the blog to date.” There's been a lot of interesting stuff on this blog over the years, and now you can use this map to find the stories of places near you, or maybe places from your youth
• Tape That - ”A collection of vintage Japanese boom boxes.” Can't say fairer than that; though not all of them are as cool as this robot
  
  

Happy invoicing!