Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. DCCCIV

[Paddy]

"Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so.”

[NickFitz]

Gloomy clouds? Chance of rain? Yes, it's a Bank Holiday! Another good reason to stay in and read this lot

• An English gentleman, a crooked lawyer: the secrets of Stephen David Jones - ”With his brilliant mind and impeccable credentials, it’s little wonder that wealthy clients trusted him with their fortunes. Then they started to get suspicious.” Remarkable that rich people seem unable to spot so many red flags
• Have we finally solved mystery of magnetic moon rocks? - ”NASA's Apollo missions brought back moon rock samples for scientists to study… Many of those lunar samples show signs of exposure to strong magnetic fields comparable to Earth's, yet the Moon doesn't have such a field today. So, how did the moon rocks get their magnetism?” As so often with the Universe, it involves things smashing into other things
• To Steal a Whale Bone - Devon Fredericksen wanted a vertebra from a dead humpback whale: ”I returned to the whale again and again, each time noticing how the carcass was more tattered and bronzed… The only thing standing between me and the whale bone was the story I believed about myself: that I would never take anything of real value that didn’t belong to me.”
• Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire - Bret Devereaux explains that the movies get archery all wrong: ”You know the scene: the general readies his archers, he orders them to ‘draw!’ and then holds up his hand with that ‘wait for it’ gesture and then shouts ‘loose!’ (or worse yet, ‘fire!’) and all of the archers release at once, producing a giant cloud of arrows… Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so.”
• ROMBAC - HT to Paddy for this tale of Nicolae Ceausescu's Romanian Communist Party buying BAC 1-11s, among other British aircraft: ”Unwilling to be too closely tied to the Soviet Union however, he started to conduct a more independent foreign policy unlike many of his Warsaw Pact counterparts and was absolutely determined to develop a self sufficient aerospace industry that would serve the country's military and civil aircraft requirements… On the 26 February 1968 six series 400 BAC 1-11s were ordered by the Romanian State Enterprise for Foreign Trade, Technoimportexport, with the first delivery taking place on the 14th June 1968. This was the start of a very long relationship with the type which lasted over 30 years.” N.B. this site is very "Web 1.0" in layout; if you don't have an 800x600 monitor handy, you might want to use your browser's "Reader" mode (or equivalent) for this
• Why AI will not spell the end of lawyers - HT to Paddy again for this article asserting that rumours of the death of the legal profession at the hands of AI have been greatly exaggerated: ”Some, like Susskind, predict that machine intelligence will massively displace lawyers. However, there are compelling reasons to believe that the future for lawyers remains bright, albeit different. If anything, AI will create new opportunities rather than wipe lawyers out.”
• What It’s Like to Be a Professional Card Counter - ”I get kicked out of a lot of casinos.” Quattro, a 24-year-old from Canada, tells Luke Winkie about the reality behind the movie depictions.
• Pilot Manual for a 1940's U.S. Navy Blimp - ”This 122 page manual contains all of the operating instructions and technical details needed to pilot this sleek, silver, 250 foot long, weaponized anti-submarine dirigible.” All I need now is the airship
• The gamer's guide to line algorithms - ”If you’ve ever tried making your own roguelike, you’ve likely encountered all sorts of strange-looking 1960s algorithms for doing geometry. Bresenham’s line algorithm is the most famous, but you often see people talking about ‘DDA lines’ among other things.” I have indeed come across various line-drawing algorithms over the years, and have implemented a few in various assembly languages. Be sure to also read the followup article, Bit Reversal Line Rasterization, about an ingenious new approach that achieves excellent performance on the C64 by offloading processing to the floppy disk controller
• Library of Congress: Free to Use and Reuse - I daresay Elon Musk will shut down the LoC before long, but until then it has this huge collection of free-to-use images covering every subject you could think of, from Abraham Lincoln to Lighthouses: ”The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use… These sets are just a small sample of the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse.” This inspirational poster by artist Hal Depuy is from 1929
  
  

Happy invoicing!