Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. DCCLXV

[DoctorStrangelove]

Mmmmmm, Titan II, mmmmmm. Now that was a rocket. . With A Proper Dr Strangelove warhead, not a namby pamby Minuteman WH.

I live several miles from a Minuteman silo in Montana, maintained by Malmstrom Air Force Base. The underground cabling between sites is also an interesting read (https://minutemanmissile.com/hics.html). Anytime I want to dig on my property, I have to make sure it won't interfere with their pressurized cables. I have heard a story from someone that did accidentally cut a cable, and Malmstrom AFB was able to locate the break and respond rapidly.

Er, wouldn't it be A Good Idea to put the cables deep enough that you couldn't stick a garden fork through one?

Just askin' like. .

[xoggoth]

That Library of Short Stories looks good.

[NickFitz]

It doesn't feel like a Bank Holiday somehow, perhaps because it isn't teeming down

• “Your Honor, Can I Tell the Whole Story?” - Yet another story of the wretched failings of what passes for a system of justice in the USA: ”A murder in New Orleans, a trial that lasted less than a day, and the lives they entangled for the next three decades.”
• The reason little noises drive you mad is about more than sounds - Hate the sound of, say, people chewing? You're not alone: ”Fascinating research into ‘misophonia’ – an intolerance to specific sounds – is revealing an important role for context.”
• 4 Foods You Only Like Because of Government Plots - ”Today, it’s easier than ever to eat food from around the world… When one type of food instead jumps the queue and becomes famous worldwide before any anything else, something a little more shady may be going on. Maybe we’ve all fallen victim to some government conspiracy.” I've often wondered where the American obsession with “mac and cheese” came from
• Library of Short Stories - Something to pass the time on a Bank Holiday: ”Read from 1000+ Short Stories.”
• King’s Road, St. Pancras Power Station - ”Walk around London today, and for a major city, the air is generally good to breath. Much of this improvement has been down to the move away from coal as a fuel… some of the worst were electricity generators, which, in the days before any form of national grid, were located across the city, close to where electricity was needed. My grandfather was the superintendent of two of these electricity power stations, both of which were in the area under the authority of the St. Pancras Vestry.” The history of a forgotten piece of London infrastructure.
• Falling for suburbia - ”Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them.” Even George Orwell railed against garden gnomes, though nobody had complained when it was rich landowners who had them
• No god in the machine: the pitfalls of AI worship - ”The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked a panic about computers gaining power over humankind. But the real threat comes from falling for the hype.” A while ago, I asked ChatGPT to generate a set of Monday Links. It gave me ten interesting-sounding articles, complete with URLs, from a range of well-known websites. Not one of the articles really existed; every single URL was a 404. So I’m still stuck doing it myself
• Ethernet History Deepdive – Why Do We Have Different Frame Types? - ”In my previous post Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports, I showed what happens to PDUs when you change the configuration of a trunk. You may have noticed that there are typically three different types of Ethernet encapsulations that we see… Historically, there were even more than three, but we’re ignoring that for now. Why do we have three? To understand this, we need to go back in history.” More than you wanted to know about how computers came to talk to each other
• Inside the guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile - Ken Shirriff meets Doctor Strangelove: ”The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only US land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)… The heart of the guidance system is the gyro stabilized platform, which uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the missile's orientation and acceleration. The computer uses the measurements from the platform to determine the missile's position and guide the missile on its trajectory to the target.”
• Swede dreams - From Sweden's DigitaltMuseum, via the stationers of Present & Correct: ”This collection of old Swedish packaging is just a fraction of what you can find… All images come from the Digital Museum archive, which compiles all exhibits from Sweden's museums.” According to Google Translate, Foom is “for easier dressing and dishes”, which TBH still doesn’t help me work out whether it’s a foodstuff or for filling gaps in the skirting board
  
  

Happy invoicing!