Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCXXXVIII

[DoctorStrangelove]

The Strangelove grandfather was a butcher.

He went bust in 1937 shortly before he could have made a fortune.

He was prosecuted for selling a piece of meat on the street in 1911, but got off, I suspect, due to being related to the beak.

[northernladuk]

Where is Ken Shirriff? The lazy b*****d. Brain the size of a planet but can't be bothered to reverse engineer something for me this week. Not good enough.

[NickFitz]

Feels like an early spring out there, with blossom already appearing on trees that produce it. Anyway, enough of that: there's stuff to look at on the Internet!

• Fresh Meat - ”I am standing in the middle of a large, stark classroom… On the block in front of me are half a dozen dead pheasants. This is the butchery department, deep in the bowels of Waltham Forest College in North East London, UK, where I am the only female student.” Olivia Potts on training as a butcher, and the broader issue of a lack of up-and-coming butchers.
• Ant geopolitics - They're coming to get you: ”It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places… This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war.”
• Emerging Pathogens - And these are coming to get you, too: ”It all started when christopher mason’s 3-year-old daughter licked a subway pole. Like any parent, he was horrified, but also keenly curious: What types of microbes might be clinging to a metal pipe gripped by countless commuters every day?… His toddler’s gross interlude inspired him to embark on a journey to unveil the world of bacteria, fungi, and viruses co-mingling with more than 8 million people in New York City’s urban jungle.”
• Scientists found a Stone Age megastructure submerged in the Baltic Sea - ”Jacob Geersen, a geophysicist with the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research… used a multibeam sonar system to map the seafloor about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) offshore. Analyzing the resulting images back in the lab, Geersen noticed a strange structure that did not seem like it would have occurred naturally. Further investigation led to the conclusion that this was a manmade megastructure built some 11,000 years ago to channel reindeer herds as a hunting strategy.” Hope they had enough butchers
• The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger - Charlotte Cowles, a financial advice journalist, has been roundly mocked on social media since publishing this article about falling prey to a scam, but it's an interesting account of how these things play out: ”The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger… His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.”
• Tesla needs graphite. Alaska has plenty. But mining it raises fears in nearby villages. - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this story about Tesla's plans for an open-cast mine: ”The mine could help power America’s electric vehicle revolution, and it’s drawing enthusiastic support from powerful government officials in both Alaska and Washington, D.C.… Many residents worry the project will harm the subsistence harvests that make life possible in a place where the nearest well-stocked grocery store is a two-hour drive away, in Nome.”
• A Man Has Died From Alaskapox. Here’s What We Know About the Virus - And HT to DoctorStrangelove again, bringing more bad news from Alaska: ”Alaska’s health department reports that the first person in the state has died from a recently discovered virus called Alaskapox… Alaskapox was first reported in a man in the Fairbanks region in 2015. Six additional cases have since been reported, all in residents of the same area—one in 2020, two in 2021, one in 2022, and two in 2023 (including the latest case).”
• Radio Waves, Sunspots, and Planets: June 1959 Popular Electronics - And once again, HT to DoctorStrangelove, for this (Alaska-free) article about the intersection of electronics and astrology: ”I did a little research on this article about John H. Nelson's work on how the positions of planets affect magnetic storms on Earth. It looked a little more like astrology than science, but as it turns out, Nelson's findings gained support in both the astronomical and meteorological fields. Naturally, the astrology crowd claimed him as part of their goofiness, but that wasn't Nelson's fault.”
• Terminal Count - Wayne Hale, a former Flight Director for NASA, explains in detail what happened (and what shouldn't) during the last 38 seconds of the countdown to a Space Shuttle launch: ”For the Space Shuttle there were a series of documents which detailed how launch operations were conducted. The most famous was S0007 (pronounced ‘Sue Seven’ or sometimes ‘S triple balls seven’). The entire document came in five volumes… In my Flight Director reference book was a copy – shown above – of Figure 13-3 ‘RSLS and GLS Interaction T-38 Seconds to T-0’. Chockablock with important stuff because a lot happened in those last seconds.”
• Taking A Subway Ride Through New York City In 1981 - Photos by Christopher Morris of the days when the NY subway was perhaps even worse than depicted in the movies: ”In 1981, 22-year-old Christopher Morris was an intern at a photo agency. ‘I was new to New York, at the very start of my career,’ he says, ‘and I became mesmerised by the total urban decay, that was most visual with the subway system.’ Over six months Morris set about capturing life below ground.”
  
  

Happy invoicing!