Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCXLI

[quackhandle]

Thinking they could live off grid with just seeds, another Darwin award.

But her poor kid did not deserve that.

qh

[DoctorStrangelove]

Well there's a thing:

https://www.i-programmer.info/histor...m-osborne.html

"The Value of Power" by General Automation.

There's a copy upstairs somewhere.

https://www.amazon.com/Value-Power-M.../dp/B000MD9FS8

[Gibbon]

NF, pity the rain drop thing doesn't say how long, otherwise I could wave to it from the (on-site) office window, but not in again until Thursday.

[NickFitz]

Seem to have hit a lot of pay- or registration-walls today, but hopefully this lot will be free of any but minor impediments to your reading pleasure

• “Please I Will Give Anything for You to Come Back” - ”Why did a mother with no backcountry experience take her sister and 13-year-old son to live off the grid on a 10,000-foot mountain during a Colorado winter?” As one might expect, it didn't end well
• ‘Entropy Bagels’ and Other Complex Structures Emerge From Simple Rules - ”Simple rules in simple settings continue to puzzle mathematicians, even as they devise intricate tools to analyze them.” Where maths is concerned, I much prefer simple. What on earth is an "Abelian group" anyway?
• Putting Atlantis At Risk - Former NASA Flight Director Wayne Hale with another story of hair-raising times for the Space Shuttle, this time about landing in a place never previously used: ”Rogers Dry Lake sometimes was not dry. In most winters the rains filled the lake, not very deep, but enough. When wet – or even damp – the lakebed surface was too soft to land a shuttle. The tires would dig in, perhaps snap off… Just as an additional consideration, the shuttle program had never used lakebed runway 33/15. The pilot astronauts took turns in the Shuttle Training Aircraft – which flew the final approach like an orbiter – and spend many hours – days – weeks – practicing landing at the runways likely to be used. Edwards 33/15 was never on the list. Nobody had ever trained to land on that runway.”
• The spy who flunked it: Kurt Gödel’s forgotten part in the atom-bomb story - ”Robert Oppenheimer’s isn’t the only film-worthy story from the nuclear age. Kurt Gödel’s cameo as a secret agent was surprising — and itself a bomb.” His journey to the US via Siberia would make a good film
• River Runner Global - ”Tap to drop a raindrop anywhere in the world and watch where it ends up.” Turns out the rain that fell outside my place yesterday will end up in the Humber estuary
• Of Gitnuganaks, Glaciers, and Life at the End of the Last Ice Age - ”Off the British Columbia coast, scientists guided by Indigenous knowledge are unearthing evidence of island life long, long ago.” As with the Icelandic sagas, legend and reality aren't always that far apart
• The Life and Death of the Bulbdial Clock - HT to ladymuck for this interesting bit of technology: ”Sundials suck. Even a properly calibrated sundial that aligns with the Earth’s tilt will still be 14 minutes ahead part of the year and 16 minutes behind later… In 2008, I came up with a solution to this problem. I wrote on my blog about an idea I called ‘The Bulbdial Clock’.”
• The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs’s Greatest Rival - ”Adam Osborne was the master of momentum—until it all came crashing down.” The story of one of the great names of the early microcomputer days, and how he came to leave it all behind.
• Reverse engineering standard cell logic in the Intel 386 processor - Ken Shirriff on more aspects of the 80386: ”Reverse-engineering these circuits shows how standard cells implement logic gates, latches, and other components with CMOS transistors. Modern integrated circuits still use standard cells, much smaller now, of course, but built from the same principles.”
• The NOAA CORS Network (NCN) Photographic Archive Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 - ”’The NOAA Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) Network (NCN), managed by NOAA/National Geodetic Survey, provide Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data, supporting three dimensional positioning, meteorology, space weather, and geophysical applications’… The following are photographs from NOAA's publicly accessible record of the establishment of that system, which began in the 1970s.” This station is in Greenland
  
  

Happy invoicing!