Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCXVIII

[DoctorStrangelove]

Rats?

Big Ancestor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5096...-h/50969-h.htm

[NickFitz]

If you feel the need for a break from riveting coverage of the Condemned Party Conference, I have just the things

• The Inside Job: A crooked cop, a dead man and an $800,000 estate fraud - ”Robert Konashewych was a young police officer with expensive tastes, two girlfriends and a mountain of debt. Heinz Sommerfeld was recently deceased with a large unclaimed estate. Problem, meet solution.”
• Artificial Intelligence Could Finally Let Us Talk with Animals - Doctor Dolittle lives: ”For nearly 20 years Gero, a scientist in residence at Carleton University in Ottawa, kept detailed records of two clans of sperm whales in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, capturing their clicking vocalizations and what the animals were doing when they made them… As a proof of concept, the team fed some of Gero's recordings to a neural network, an algorithm that learns skills by analyzing data. It was able to correctly identify a small subset of individual whales from the codas 99 percent of the time.”
• We finally know for sure what a trilobite ate - ”Trilobites first appear early in the Cambrian and are one of the earliest examples of arthropods, the group that includes all insects. They flourished for over 100 million years, leaving fossils that are seemingly ubiquitous—we've described over 20,000 different trilobite species… Today, researchers are describing an exquisitely preserved sample that includes several of the animal's last meals, which suggests that this particular animal was a bit like an aquatic vacuum cleaner.” It wasn't a very discerning eater.
• In Defense of the Rat - ”Rats are less pestilent and more lovable than we think. Can we learn to live with them?” You first
• The Cash Machine Is Blue And Green - ”Selling people on the idea of a machine that spits out money was obviously not easy. But then a freak weather event happened, and everything began to click.” Ernie Smith on the history of the cash machine. I used one the other day to get some cash, and I think it was only the second time this year, maybe even the first.
• A Nice Walk: Old Oak Common to Euston - Diamond Geezer follows the proposed walking route for travellers to London: ”Old Oak Common is the perfect terminus for a high speed rail link, especially if you live in Harlesden. It's a vast obsolete rail depot ripe with development potential and also crisscrossed by numerous other railway lines, none of which yet have a station here. But that lack of connectivity won't be a problem when HS2 arrives… All you have to do is follow an approximate straight line eastwards on foot, as any business traveller would, taking just two more hours to reach your ultimate destination and maintaining all the timely benefits of the high speed line.”
• It went through the wall!: Quatermass and the Pit (1958) - ”Jon Dear, writer and co-host of the Nigel Kneale podcast, Bergcast, takes a detailed look at the classic 1958 BBC television production of Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit…”
• A Baker’s Secrets - ”In the annals of food and memory, I know of no story so peculiar as the mysterious disappearance—now more than three decades ago—of the Guerrilla Cookie from the shelves of Midwestern food co-ops. A confection with a cult following, it rose to popularity in Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1970s. Then, sometime around 1990, it was gone.” Dave Denison, who worked in the bakery that made them as a student, searches for the story behind the long-lost cookies.
• How flip-flops are implemented in the Intel 8086 processor - Ken Shirriff digs yet deeper into the classic processor: ”I take a close look at the flip-flops in the 8086: what they do and how they are implemented. In particular, I will focus on the dynamic flip-flop, which holds its value using capacitance, much like DRAM. Many of these flip-flops use a somewhat unusual ‘enable’ input, which allows the flip-flop to hold its value for multiple clock cycles.”
• Revisit 51 Years of Giant Pandas at the National Zoo, From Beloved Babies to Fun in the Snow - ”Pat Nixon sat next to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai at a dinner in Beijing. Spotting a cigarette tin decorated with an image of two pandas, she commented, ‘Aren’t they cute? I love them.’ Zhou replied, ‘I’ll give you some,’ prompting the first lady to ask, ‘Cigarettes?’ ‘No,’ the premier said. ‘Pandas.’” With frostier relationships between China and the USA, current residents Tian Tian, Mei Xiang and their cub Xiao Qi Ji are expected to return to China by early December, leaving Washington DC pandaless This photo of cub Bei Bei being weighed is from 2015.
  
  

Happy invoicing!