Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCLXIV

[NickFitz]

I'm disappointed and slightly surprised you can't find a straight-line route that never bumps into land? Or is the rule you have to start at land, invalidating this case?

I think the idea was to find the longest sea route between two points on land

[ladymuck]

• NASA's DART Mission to Impact Asteroid Today - ”<Movie preview narrator voice> Asteroids have caused multiple mass extinctions. On Monday, Earth strikes back. </Movie preview narrator voice>”

And it successfully hit its target! Now to see what effect the impact has on its trajectory. Would be ironic if it ended up on an earth-bound course

[d000hg]

I'm disappointed and slightly surprised you can't find a straight-line route that never bumps into land? Or is the rule you have to start at land, invalidating this case?

[NickFitz]

And we technically created the web (although CERN will claim to be part of it)...

It was very kind of CERN to provide a desk, chair, and NeXT cube so TBL could get on with the job of making the Internet usable by normal people

[eek]

Take a break from watching the markets plummet with this selection of things wholly unrelated to the state of the nation [LIST][*]A few lessons learned from tracking The Queue - Interesting case study of how an app for tracking the endpoint of The Queue was hastily put together: ”Just over a week ago, I got a call from a friend at DCMS asking for ideas on how they might help people to find the end of the queue for Her Majesty the Queen’s Lying-in-State… The challenge was to show the current position of the queue, styled up clearly in a way that would show up in a two-pane livestream, and refresh it whenever a new location was reported. From proof of concept to launch was about 3 days.”

Happy invoicing!

In many ways, it was indeed the most bonkersly British bit of internet ever invented.

And we technically created the web (although CERN will claim to be part of it)...

[DoctorStrangelove]

Gosh. Floppy diskettes. Wot a thing.

The least reliable were the 1.2Mb 5.25" AT diskettes.

360k 5.25" are pretty robust.

Apart from any that have stuff on it that you actually want of course.

Dunno about the 3" version.

I'll wager that the LS120 version is a nightmare.

[NickFitz]

Take a break from watching the markets plummet with this selection of things wholly unrelated to the state of the nation

• We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business - ”Turns out the obsolete floppy is way more in demand than you’d think.” Interview with Tom Persky, floppy disk king of the world because nobody else is left
• Robert Provine: the critical human importance of laughter, connections and contagion - ”Robert Provine made several critically important contributions to science, and in this paper, we will elaborate some of his research into laughter and behavioural contagion. To do this, we will employ Provine's observational methods and use a recorded example of naturalistic laughter to frame our discussion of Provine's work. The laughter is from a cricket commentary broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1991, in which Jonathan Agnew and Brian Johnston attempted to summarize that day's play, at one point becoming overwhelmed by laughter.” Cricket commentary informs science
• The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance - ”The noble but undervalued craft of maintenance could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids, and serve as a useful framework for addressing climate change and other pressing planetary constraints.” The benefits of keeping stuff working.
• The Wright Brothers: Babysitters Extraordinaire - They were good uncles, it seems: ”Wilbur and Orville Wright may not have been ‘first in flight,’ but they were first in taking care of their nieces and nephews on the weekends.”
• NASA's DART Mission to Impact Asteroid Today - ”<Movie preview narrator voice> Asteroids have caused multiple mass extinctions. On Monday, Earth strikes back. </Movie preview narrator voice>”
• The Longest Route You Can Sail in a Straight Line Without Hitting Land - ”One person discovered the route in 2012, but it took until now to prove it.” It’s a surprisingly long way.
• Bioacoustics: What nature’s sounds can tell us about the health of our world - ”Recording the soundscapes of our ecosystems is a burgeoning field that allows researchers to better decode what the Earth is saying. But are we listening?”
• Has The Zodiac Killer Mystery Been Solved (Again)? - ”For more than 50 years, his identity has remained a maddening riddle. But now an L.A. novelist-turned-amateur sleuth may have finally cracked the case, revealing who was behind some of the most notorious serial slayings in California history.” Been solved more times than Jack the Ripper, this one
• A few lessons learned from tracking The Queue - Interesting case study of how an app for tracking the endpoint of The Queue was hastily put together: ”Just over a week ago, I got a call from a friend at DCMS asking for ideas on how they might help people to find the end of the queue for Her Majesty the Queen’s Lying-in-State… The challenge was to show the current position of the queue, styled up clearly in a way that would show up in a two-pane livestream, and refresh it whenever a new location was reported. From proof of concept to launch was about 3 days.”
• 19th Century American Trade Cards - Lots of cool old designs, courtesy of Boston Public Library (the Massachusetts one, not Lincolnshire): ”Color lithographed Victorian-era trade cards were a key late-19th century advertising vehicle for national manufacturers and local businesses. These miniature posters, about the size of a postcard, were handed out as souvenirs at major expositions during the late Victorian period. They were distributed at stores, placed on sales counters free for the taking, and passed out by ‘drummers’ who walked the streets looking for customers.” This one offers “$1000 reward for the proof of the existence of a better liniment for human & animal flesh than ‘Merchant's Gargling Oil’ or a better worm remedy than ‘Merchant's Worm Tablets’.”
  
  

Happy invoicing!