Monday Links from the Fading Light of 2024 vol. DCCLXXXIII

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Monday Links from the Fading Light of 2024 vol. DCCLXXXIII

Some light reading to pass the time as you try to finish the Quality Street, Roses, stilton, etc. in time to open the New Year batch of same

The ‘mad egghead’ who built a mouse utopia - The now-forgotten work of John Calhoun, ecologist and psychologist, who studied rats and mice to learn what might become of us: ”For Universe 25, he had built a large, very intricate apartment block for mice. There were 16 identical apartment buildings arranged in a square with four buildings on each side… Calhoun had marked each mouse resident with a unique colour combination and he or his team sat in a loft over this mouseopolis, for hours every day, for more than three years, and watched what unfolded.”
The Canoe in the Forest - ”An unfinished boat hidden on a remote island in Alaska illuminates a missing chapter in the history of traditional Haida and Tlingit canoe building.” Sadly, this will be the final link to Hakai Magazine as it's closing down at the end of the year, though its writers and editorial staff are moving to a new home. More info: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
2024 in Review - Quanta's annual roundup of all the best in mathematics and the sciences, so you can read all the good stuff I haven't already posted here
What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year? - Another annual favourite: ”Do you realize that this is the 12th year we've run this series? Time really flies when you don't have something lodged up your butt. But for those of you who do, read on to see if you made this year's list of the weirdest stuff that entered America's orifices. If not, there's always next year.”
After coming back from the dead, the world’s largest aircraft just flew a real payload - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this story I'd missed earlier in the year:”As the design of the vehicle evolved, its wingspan grew to 117 meters, nearly double the size of a Boeing 747 aircraft. It far exceeded the wingspan of the Spruce Goose, built by Howard Hughes in the 1940s, which had a wingspan of 97.5 meters. The Roc aircraft was so large that it seemed impractical to fly on a regular basis.”
Understanding the 1914 Christmas Truce - Historian Simon Jones seeks the truth behind the stories of carol singing in the trenches and football matches in No Man's Land: ”Like much about the First World War, the 1914 Truce is an event which in the view of many historians has been popularly misrepresented… But as many as a hundred eyewitness accounts prove beyond doubt that many truces really happened, not only in the British-held sector but also that of their French ally.”
Haarlemmermeermuseum De Cruquius - HT to DoctorStrangelove again for a feast of information on this mighty Cornish beam engine in the Netherlands: ”The main cylinder of this huge engine has a diameter of 3.66 meter or 144 inches! This engine could drain up 320.000 liters of water per minute, that’s an Olympic sized swimming pool every 8 minutes. The engine room, unchanged since 1849, is a marvel of Victorian technology.” It was manufactured by Harvey and Company of Hayle (an inlet of St. Ives Bay on the North coast of Cornwall) and here's a video about it:
Calling Pink Floyd - HT to vetran for this one: ”[Corelatus] said recently that “someone” asked them to identify the phone signals in the 1982 film The Wall, based on the Pink Floyd song of the same name. We suspect that, like us, that someone might have been more just the hacker part of the brain asserting itself… You can learn a lot of gory details about phone network in-band signaling from the post.” The links within the article go into much more detail: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' and Pink Floyd’s Young Lust – Explained and Demystified
Intel's $475 million error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug - Ken Shirriff is back and he's found the flaw in the Pentium that cost Intel nearly half a billion dollars: ”I discuss the Pentium's division algorithm, show exactly where the bug is on the Pentium chip, take a close look at the circuitry, and explain what went wrong. In brief, the division algorithm uses a lookup table. In 1994, Intel stated that the cause of the bug was that five entries were omitted from the table due to an error in a script. However, my analysis shows that 16 entries were omitted due to a mathematical mistake in the definition of the lookup table.”
The Hanford Site is America's most contaminated nuclear location. See photos of its long, toxic past. - HT to DocotrStrangelove again for this gallery of the nuclear research site that was used from the Manhattan Project through the Cold War, and left incredibly highly polluted: ”In 1989, after years of dismissing concerns about contamination, the site's management finally said the site needed to be cleaned up. But cleaning up nuclear waste is difficult… The longer the contaminated materials are left untreated, the worse they become. Plus, natural disasters could spread the site's contamination.”