Monday Links from the Sofa vol. DCCLXVI

Last week, I got to shut down the project I've been working on for eighteen months with unseemly but money-saving haste. Now I'm taking September off before resuming invoicing in October, which means plenty of time to find stuff like this for you to read on billable time

The Contingency Contingent - Leigh Claire La Berge on her graduate job working with consultants from Arthur Andersen LLP, making ready for the coming of the Millennium Bug: ”It was a fake job because the problem that the Conglomerate had hired Andersen to solve was not real, at least not in the sense that it needed to be solved or that Andersen could solve it. The problem was known variously as Y2K, or the Year 2000, or the Y2K Bug… With a world-ending scenario on the horizon, employment standards were being relaxed.”
Here a Bee, There a Bee, Everywhere a Wild Bee - There's more variety among bees than you might think: ”There are over 3,000 known species of bees in western North America and identifying them is an arcane science. Even the field guide Common Bees of Western North America lumps bees into comically untechnical yet sensible groupings, such as ‘bees that are extremely large’ and ‘bees that are very hairy.’”
Bilinguals perceive shades differently based on which language they are using - ”Lithuanian has two distinct words for blue whereas Norwegian has only one word to describe all shades of blue. The study found that when bilingual participants engaged in a color discrimination task while using Lithuanian, they were quicker to differentiate between light and dark blue shades. However, this effect diminished when they performed the same task in Norwegian.” The full paper is in Language Learning if you want all the details: Active Language Modulates Color Perception in Bilinguals
Your Name In Landsat - ”Type in your name to see it spelled out in Landsat imagery of Earth!” Just that
Lorem ipsum: Filler Fail, Killer Tale - The true story of the Latin(ish) filler text: ”There are any number of internet wiseacres to tell you that this filler text is half a millennium old, artfully knocked together by some crafty printer in the 1500s. Not quite. It is instead precisely 55 years old, and simultaneously 2,065 years old.”
Movie Posters Perfected - If you like movie posters, you’ll like this: ”A live, cloud-based library of over 3,600 curated movie posters you can stream to your digital display.” Includes details of how to set up a wall-mounted display so you can see an ever-changing series of posters in all their glory
What We Learned Inside a North Korean Internet Server: How Well Do You Know Your Partners? - ”A misconfigured North Korean Internet cloud server has provided a fascinating glance into the world of North Korean animation outsourcing and how foreign companies might be inadvertently employing North Korean companies on information technology (IT) projects. The incident also underlines how difficult it is for foreign companies to verify their outsourced work is not potentially breaking sanctions and ending up on computers in Pyongyang.” Is Octonauts being secretly infiltrated by Juche ideology?
A Reading of Homer (work in progress) - Homer’s work was originally declaimed or recited, but what did that sound like? An East Anglian scholar (whose name I’ve been unable to find on the site) has done his best to read it aloud: ”The aim so far has been to produce, in a reasonable time period, a free, accessible, spoken version, with moderately good audio quality and linked to a metrically tagged text.” For a given book, use the checkboxes along the top to enable various features that highlight the currently spoken text, then click on the first line (or wherever you left off) to listen. Should you need to brush up your Homeric Greek, Laura Gibbs has you covered with Homeric Greek Resources. And if you want to follow along in English, I recommend the recent translations by Emily Wilson
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes - Nolen Royalty on discovering that one of his fun online experiments had been subverted, in a good way: ”A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens.”
Endangered Experiences: Photographing the Mountain Gorilla in Rwanda - Award-winning wildlife and conservation photographer Amish Chhagan visits some apes: ”The gorillas seemed unperturbed by our presence as if they were allowing us a glimpse into their world. The expressions on their faces spoke volumes – wisdom, curiosity, and a deep connection with each other. Their tranquil demeanor conveyed a sense of peace and acceptance. It was as if we had entered a sacred sanctuary, where humans and gorillas coexisted harmoniously.”