Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCXXIII

[Peoplesoft bloke]

On the Tiny Tubes thing: the concept of the VT fuze went over the pond with Tizard in 1940.

Don't tell the Septics, it offends their "everything was invented here" obsession.

I remember going to the NASA museum in Washington DC and seeing a very interesting display about an aircraft called the AV-8A.

That was the Septic's version of the Harrier - of course there was zero mention of the origin of the plane anywhere, it was just presented as another peerless US achievement.

[DoctorStrangelove]

On the Tiny Tubes thing: the concept of the VT fuze went over the pond with Tizard in 1940.

Don't tell the Septics, it offends their "everything was invented here" obsession.

[NickFitz]

No meetings for me today other than standup, but it turns out that's even worse - I have to work instead!

• Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet - When an undersea volcano cut Tonga off from the Internet, it meant a lot more than being unable to use Facebook: ”When I first learned about Tonga’s internet outage, I thought its citizens must have been hurled back to the 1990s. But in fact, the internet has replaced so many other technologies… that the country was catapulted further back still, to a time before the telegraph and scheduled flights reached these parts of the Pacific. With the fracture of a single cable, Tonga was plunged into the kind of isolation it hadn’t seen in more than a century.”
• Generations of Bearded Vultures Stashed Humans’ Treasures, Including a 650-Year-Old Sandal, in These Bird Nests - ”Researchers recovered more than 200 human artifacts from historical nests in southern Spain.” The birds are no longer found in Spain, but had built up nests in secluded mountain locations over the course of centuries. More details are in the paper The Bearded Vulture as an accumulator of historical remains: Insights for future ecological and biocultural studies
• Uncaged: Bringing Vietnam’s Bile Bear Industry to an End - ”As wildlife advocates fight to free the last captives of Vietnam’s bile farms, rescued bears find dignity in the country’s sanctuaries.” Poor bears
• A message from the dark genome: the genetic ghosts that haunt and help us - Apparently useless DNA isn't so useless after all: ”Long dismissed as genetic junk, the dark genome is stepping into the spotlight, revealing how ancient viral remnants and rogue DNA elements impact evolution and disease.”
• Google Maps Explained - ”Hi! I'm Geo, your guide to understanding how Google Maps works! Today we'll explore the algorithms that power navigation apps.” Interactive app explaining how different route planning algorithms come together to get you from A to B
• CrowdGuessr - ”Guess the number of people in crowd photos! The more accurate and faster your guesses are, the more points you earn!” I played this for the first time yesterday, and I was rubbish at it
• The Time Sean Connery Punched a Real Mobster in the Face - ”Sean Connery's onscreen tough guy persona had an element of truth to it, and he once took on a notorious mob enforcer and won.” A very strange story
• NYC’s Urban Textscape - ”What if you could search every visible word on New York City’s streets?… Media artist Yufeng Zhao fed millions of publicly-available panoramas from Google Street View into a computer program that transcribes text within the images.” Quite a cool idea!
• Tiny Tubes - ”For years, subminiature vacuum tubes were looking like the future of electronics—until a key figure in their rise heard about something better.” We'd all be using these still if the transistor hadn't come along
• Last Stop: Watching London From A Double Decker Bus - Photographer George Georgiou takes photos from the bus: ”The essence of Last Stop is that you might take the same route every day but what you see, the ebb and flow on the street takes on a random nature, like a series of fleeting mini soap operas.”
  
  

Happy invoicing!