Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCII

[WTFH]

For the next n+1 hours I shall be watching the live tube map.

[NickFitz]

Lovely weather today, because it isn't a Bank Holiday

• Deliverance - ”A telekinetic teenager became a convicted killer. Can a group of strangers prove that Christina Boyer is really a victim of injustice?” I suspect that in Alabama, being perceived as some kind of witch doesn't help
• What the Caribou Remember - ”A herd of ungulates in Alaska draws on experience to adapt to a changing winter landscape.” Sensible of them, though it might be better if we stopped changing their landscape.
• Title of Work Deciphered In Sealed Herculaneum Scroll Via Digital Unwrapping - The project to decipher heat-damaged Roman scrolls is starting to bear fruit: ”Using ‘virtual unwrapping’, the scroll PHerc. 172 which is housed at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford has been identified as On Vices by the Greek philosopher Philodemus… Researchers have been awarded the Vesuvius Challenge First Title Prize which includes prize money of $60,000.”
• Dementia With Lewy Bodies and the Neurobehavioral Decline of Mervyn Peake - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this paper which examines possible evidence in the author's works for the onset and progression of dementia: ”His exceptional career was prematurely ended by a neurodegenerative illness… A breakdown in his writing style has frequently been cited as reflecting his encroaching dementia.”
• Meet the Man Who Finds Melodies Inside Mushrooms - Musical plants and fungi: ”Nayar is not your traditional musician—he’s a fungi whisperer. By connecting cables from his custom-built modular synthesizers to mushrooms, fruits, and leaves, he transforms their natural bioelectric signals into captivating sounds.”
• London's Busiest Bus Stops - Map plus data to help you avoid busy buses in London: ”Data is from 2024, and is based on a TfL response to an April 2025 FOI request and the TfL API. Data may be missing from stops where route has subsequently been amended.”
• Live Tube Map - real-time London Underground Trains - And if you prefer to skulk beneath the surface of the capital, this is undoubtedly the prettiest of the various real-time maps on offer
• The stories behind Hollywood studios’ opening fanfares - ”As studio intros have grown more elaborate over time, their musical accompaniments have developed too. With the major studios, you’ll have heard many of them countless times before all kinds of movies, and evidently, it’s an important part of Hollywood branding.” The stories of the bits before the films
• Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry - Ken Shirriff continues his dissection of the Intel processor: ”The purpose of the prefetch queue is to fetch instructions from memory before they are needed, so the processor usually doesn't need to wait on memory while executing instructions… One interesting circuit is the incrementer, which adds 1 to a pointer to step through memory. This sounds easy enough, but the incrementer uses complicated circuitry for high performance.”
• The Courtauld releases huge art photo archive online for free - ”A huge archive of over two million images of Western art spanning eight centuries has been digitised and published online for the public to explore for free.” This fine parrot by Fernand Léger is from a page in a Christie's catalogue
  
  

Happy invoicing!