Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCLVII

[DoctorStrangelove]

Gosh. Things to do with shelf labels, who'd have thunk it?

The prairie thing reminded me of "The Homesman (2014)", another film Hilary Swank never made it to the end of.

[NickFitz]

Late again

• King of the Hill - ”Andres Beckett dreamed of competing in a punishing rodeo event known as the Suicide Race. But more difficult than charging down its dangerously steep track was earning a spot at the starting line.” Good story, though I'm glad I don't come from a place where you're expected to engage in such pursuits
• Neuronal Scaffolding Plays Unexpected Role in Pain - ”Perineuronal nets, rigid structures that hold certain neurons in place, affect a surprising amount of brain activity, including some associated with chronic pain.”
• Dunwich’s very English apocalypse - Always good to read reflections on the lost port of Dunwich: ”Dunwich met her end not courtesy of fire and brimstone but by wind and sand and rain, lots and lots of rain… If the tenth largest city in the country (Sheffield, for those of you wondering) were to disappear, it would be front page news for months and talked of for centuries, but Dunwich is scarcely mentioned now, and even then only by anoraks or in vague whispers.”
• Is the Silence of the Great Plains to Blame for ‘Prairie Madness’? - ”In the 1800s, as American settlers pushed westward into the Great Plains, stories began to emerge of formerly stable people becoming depressed, anxious, irritable, and even violent with ‘prairie madness.’… This eerie soundscape—the silence and the howling wind—could indeed have contributed to mental illness in settlers.” They never mentioned this in The Little House on the Prairie
• GPS Jam - A project by John Wiseman to map areas where GPS jamming is being used: ”The maps uses data provided by ADS-B Exchange to generate maps of likely GPS interference, based on aircraft reports of their navigation system accuracy.” Lots of it around Moscow, unsurprisingly.
• 35mm Online - Free Polish films: ”The 35mm.online platform presents the wealth of Polish cinematography. It offers artistic, educational and historical achievements of Polish cinematography to its users.”
• Study sheds light on how dogs recognize their favorite toys - ”Specific breeds of dogs, like border collies, can learn the verbal names of their favorite toys, but what is going on in the dog's mind when it's told to fetch a given toy? According to a recent paper published in the journal Animal Cognition, these dogs store key sensory features about their toys—notably what they look like and how they smell—and recall those features when searching for the named toy.”
• We Are Not All Alone Unhappy - A game in which you put two Shakespeare characters from different plays together to see what they have to say to each other: ”It asks players to create a pairing between two characters who received canonically unhappy endings in Shakespeare’s plays… The characters still remember betrayal and murder, and have not (necessarily) forgiven those who wronged them. These characters carry their personalities and preoccupations into these meetings, and success or failure in a conversation is determined by (my judgment of) what might fulfill each character’s emotional arc. ”
• Building a Panel out of e-ink Electronic Shelf Labels - ”This is the story of how I daisy-chained a bunch of electronic shelf labels (ESL) to decorate my office wall.” A fun little project if you can find a bunch of such items
• Spomenik Database - ”An exploration of Yugoslavia's historic and enigmatic endeavor into abstract anti-fascist WWII monument building between 1960 & 1990.” We’ve had photos of some of these before, but there’s loads of info about these impressive monuments in here. This one is at Ilirska Bistrica in what is now Slovenia:
  
  

Happy invoicing!