Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCLXXV

[DoctorStrangelove]

There is one slight error in the nuke thing:

The largest "pure fission" A-Bomb ever detonated was the 500 kiloton yield "Ivy King" on November 16, 1952.

Nope: "we" detonated a 720kt boosted fission device that pretended to be a thermonuke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange...0ever%20tested.

[NickFitz]

Take a break from working out what to do with the farm when you die and read something interesting instead

• The Crash of the Hammer - ”How concerned citizens ran a Neo-Nazi out of rural Maine.” Weird how these ubermenschen always want to build themselves a kind of makeshift Center Parcs
• The brain collector: the scientist unravelling the mysteries of grey matter - All in the head: ”Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a 35-year-old mortician turned molecular palaeontologist, had been behind the wheel of her rented Vauxhall for five hours… Behind her sat a small, black picnic cooler. Within 24 hours, it would be full of human brains – not modern specimens, but brains that had contemplated this landscape as far back as the middle ages.”
• Drunk animals far more common than previously thought, scientists say - HT to xoggoth for this one: ”Drinking alcohol may be far less of a human characteristic than previously thought, according to a new scientific paper arguing that ethanol consumption is widespread in the animal kingdom.” The full paper is The evolutionary ecology of ethanol
• A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem - There's been some incorrect reporting of this one over the last few days, so let's just go straight to the paper: ”Here, we consider the Finite Monkeys Theorem and look at the probability of a given string being typed by one of a finite number of monkeys within a finite time allocation consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe. We also calculate the expected number of keystrokes until a target string would first be produced.”
• Ask Ethan: Why isn’t Richard Feynman your personal hero? - Ethan Siegel explains why he rejects the hero worship of Feynman: ”There are a great many traits about Feynman that are to be disdained, not praised, and too many people praise them anyway. Feynman was a great physicist, but a hugely flawed man. Here’s why.”
• A Shark Attack and a Terrorist Bombing: This Is a Love Story - An unusual series of events that brought a couple together: ”The attack at the Boston Marathon nearly killed her. Two years later and five thousand miles away, a violent encounter with a shark took his leg. Had either event not occurred, they wouldn’t be married today.”
• Twiggy the panther, Congo the hippo, and other animals that escaped their homes at Singapore Zoo - Let my people go: ”After an African monkey was caught in Choa Chu Kang on Nov 1, having fled from its exhibit six months earlier, The Straits Times looks at other animals that have managed to escape from their enclosures at the Singapore Zoo.”
• “Atomic Follies” by Jim Beall - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this rundown of odd applications of nuclear technologies: ”No one knew what would or even could be done with the new handwavium-become-real technology, least of all government bureaucrats who promulgated federal regulations to control it with almost surreal celerity. The public's fascination with anything atomic quickly reached astounding heights.”
• Weird Lexical Syntax - ”I just learned 42 programming languages this month to build a new syntax highlighter for llamafile. I feel like I'm up to my eyeballs in programming languages right now. Now that it's halloween, I thought I'd share some of the spookiest most surprising syntax I've seen.” I had expected Forth to rank higher in weirdness, but I suppose Reverse Polish Notation actually makes a lot more sense than Infix from the perspective of writing a parser
• Standard Chartered Weather Photographer of the Year 2024 Winners - There are wonderful things to be seen if you come out from under your umbrella: ”The winners were chosen by an international panel of judges with combined expertise in meteorology, photography, climate science and journalism.” Mark McColl captured this shot of the Barnweil Monument, Ayrshire, in freezing mist
  
  

Happy invoicing!