Monday Links from the Plague House vol. DCLII

[GJABS]

I’ve given the Wordle article to Mr C as he’s a new but keen player.

Wordle is for amateurs. What you really want to play is Absurdle. It's the same as Wordle, but they change the destination word away from the letters chosen, making it harder.

https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html

[cojak]

I’ve given the Wordle article to Mr C as he’s a new but keen player.

[jamesbrown]

The bird identification thing is cool (as someone who likes maths more than birds ). Sounds similar to Shazam, although that uses a spectrogram as a fingerprint rather than (what sounds like) a byproduct.

[DoctorStrangelove]

And there it is: Gone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockl...ockleyBldg.jpg


I think it was still there the last time I looked some years ago.

The Hewlett Packard Garage is definitely still there.

[NickFitz]

Gradually recovering from covid - the perfect time to get an infected tooth!

• Hunting For Kobyla - Simon Wiesenthal’s long pursuit of a Nazi guard: ”Wiesenthal considered the three women. Their request was familiar, but the name they’d inquired about⁠⁠—Kobyla⁠⁠—was not. He knew that ‘kobyla’ meant ‘mare’ in Polish… ‘Forgive me,’ the first woman said. ‘We always think everybody must know who Kobyla was. We called her that because she was always kicking the women in the camp. Her real name was Hermine Braunsteiner… She was the worst of them all.’”
• Slowest ever neutron star is found in cosmic graveyard - ”An unusual pulsating radio signal emerging from a ‘stellar graveyard’ could be evidence for a new class of neutron star, according to an international team of scientists. The pulsar signal comes from a 53 million-year-old neutron star rotating once every 76 s  – making this the slowest rotating neutron star ever observed.”
• Ancient DNA points to where the Black Death began - New genetic evidence might suggest where the European plague originated: ”Two villages in northern Kyrgyzstan—Kara-Djigach and Burana—are compelling places to look. The timing fits; an unnamed ‘pestilence’ killed unusually large numbers of people in the area just a few years before the Black Death struck Europe… To test the idea, archaeologist Maria Spyrou of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and her colleagues needed to find out what had actually killed the victims of whatever was spreading in 1338-1339.”
• William Shockley — accidental inventor of Silicon Valley - ”Genius physicist was about to change the world but he became a ridiculed footnote to history. His hubris is perhaps a lesson for today’s tech titans.” He may have invented the solid state transistor, but he seems to have been a very unpleasant man.
• A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon - Recognising Aztec gods is quite complicated: ”Each has a base form that is “dressed” with important symbolic accessories. Even specialists have difficulty identifying gods as these symbols can be emphasized for a particular worship, or switched between deities if they share similar fields of competence. Thus, gods can have multiple disguises, also known as aspects or nahual, and will freely share them with others.” This is Metztli: “Lowly god of darkness and worms who failed to sacrifice himself to become the sun and, instead, became the moon.”
  
  
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Memes - ”An Interview with Don Caldwell, the Editor-in-Chief of Know Your Meme.” Interesting look at how the definitive meme site tracks things down.
• Why Claude Shannon Would Have Been Great at Wordle - Applying information theory to the word game: ”Perhaps you have a favorite first word that helps you solve the puzzle in fewer than the six allowed guesses. Or maybe you like to mix it up at the start and play your hunches. However you approach this word game, knowing a bit about a mathematical field called information theory can help you achieve your best scores.”
• On Stretch Wrap - More than you thought there was to know about clingfilm: ”The ship itself: a gigantic rectangle. Steel containers form an improbable stack of colorful bricks atop the deck, held together with twist-locks and lashing rods. Inside the shipping containers square wooden pallets subdivide the space, a nesting layer of modularity that bundles together smaller boxes and turns items into moveable and trackable units. But between the inner layers of this modular vision of blocks, cubes, and interchangeable units is the diaphanous material that holds together the subcomponents of the containerized world: stretch wrap.”
• Neural Network Identifies Bird Calls, Even On Your Pi - HT to vetran for this cool project: ”Having equipped your Pi with a USB sound card, you can make it do 24/7 recording and analysis using a “lite” version of BirdNET. Then, you get a web interface you can log into and see bird sounds identified in real-time. Not just that – BirdNET-Pi also processes the sounds and creates spectrograms, keeps the sound in a database, and can even send you notifications.”
• The incredible boxes of Hock Wah Yeo - Innovative games packaging: ”Yeo is a graphic designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and through the 80s and 90s, he created the boldest, most unusual packaging in the game industry. While other game publishers were trying to get attention with flashy, colorful, in-your-face aesthetics, Yeo was deconstructing the idea of what a game box could be altogether.” The black thing poking out of the front of this 1991 box proved to be extremely annoying to shelf stackers
  
  

Happy invoicing!