Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCXXVIII

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Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCXXVIII

Fed up with hearing lies from the Covid inquiry? The truth is in here, somewhere, maybe

A National Evil - ”At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed elsewhere to a degree, but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the country. It was a curse that had a mark: the goitre, a bulge of flesh protruding from the front of the neck, sometimes so large that it weighed on the windpipe, giving bearers a characteristic wheeze.” Jonah Goodman uncovers the history of a major public health intervention.
Australia's animals beat the summer heat using mucous, saliva and precision engineering - It may be cold here but down under, it's summer: ”Unlike us, a lot of Australia's animals cannot sweat to keep cool… Whether it's going to sleep for a year, fly-by belly dipping or covering themselves in mucous, these are some of the fascinating and bizarre methods of fauna battling hot weather.”
Scientists Have Reported a Breakthrough In Understanding Whale Language - ”Researchers have identified new elements of whale vocalizations that they propose are analogous to human speech, including vowels and pitch.” I dread to think what they'll have to say about us when they find out we can understand
HUFF DUFF and the Battle of the Atlantic - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this thread from the World Naval Ships forum: ”High frequency direction finder is usually known by its acronym HF/DF, pronounced Huff-Duff. This has become the common name for this type of radio direction finder, and was coined during World War II… ‘Huff-Duff’ was a valuable part of the Allies' armoury in detecting German U-boats and commerce raiders during the Battle of the Atlantic.”
Doom at 30: what it means, by the people who made it - ”In 1993, a team of five coders released what would become one of the most influential video games ever made. Three decades on, they explain how they did it.” Good bit of gaming history
‘How do you reduce a national dish to a powder?’: the weird, secretive world of crisp flavours - ”Why can you buy lasagne flavour snacks in Thailand but not in Italy? Which country can cope with the hottest chilli? And why do Germans like paprika so much?” Amelia Tait travels the globe, starting in Leicester at Walker’s Crisps of course, to uncover a world of flavours
Fake chips, I got stung - No, not American crisps, but dodgy 6502 microprocessors: ”Unfortunately, in the tech sector, just like many other sectors, there are scammers around. When you are dealing with electronics this is typically in the form of chips that have had their markings changed, usually to make them appear as if they are a more expensive chip. This has happened to me, so I’ll talk a bit about it.”
The Burry Inlet Anthrax Bomb Test 1942 - More interesting history via DoctorStrangelove: ”Any inhabitant of Llanelli who happened to be looking south, across the estuary, at about 5 PM on Wednesday, 28 October 1942, would have seen a single Bristol Blenheim bomber flying at 182 MPH at about 5,000 feet. The bomber flew over the north Gower salt marshes, where it dropped one bomb… What they were witnessing was actually one of the most controversial events in the entire history of Llanelli, north Gower and the Burry Inlet, namely the dropping of a bomb filled with anthrax spores.”
Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking - When the Lower Silesian Railway switched their train maintenance contract to a different company, the trains stopped working. A team of white-hat Polish hackers got them running again: ”Figuring out how to get the train to run wasn’t even half the battle – you still had to figure out why it broke down, and this is where the thrill ride begins… After hundreds of hours spent on code dumped from dozens of trainsets, it was possible to identify some very interesting mechanisms causing sudden train sickness.”
The Mystical Drawings of William Thomas Horton (1864-1919) - ”William Thomas Horton (1864–1919) was one of the Smithers People, a number of artists sponsored by Leonard Smithers (1861–1907),a leading light of the Decadent movement and publisher of upscale pornography… His apparent simplicity of his black and white images seem to mask more than they reveal – fitting, no doubt, for a member of the Golden Dawn occult society.” It’s interesting to note some similarities in style to that of Pamela Coleman Smith, who drew the renowned Rider-Waite Tarot deck, and was also a member of one of the offshoots of the Golden Dawn (as was A.E. Waite)