Monday Links from the Fireside Vol. XLIX

[suityou01]

Spacelog - "Space exploration stories from the original transcripts." NASA has long made available transcripts of its space mission communication logs, but they were plain text and difficult to search or link to. Now, /dev/fort are converting the logs to properly hyperlinked documents; up so far are Mercury 6 and Apollo 13. The key moment of the latter's mission is here.

It will be interesting to see the transacript for Apollo 8. I believe in it Jim Lovell says "Be advised there is a Santa Claus", while he was on the dark side of the moon.

This was allegedly code which meant, we have spotted life on the dark side of the moon.

[DaveB]

It turns out that no less than three of the sites I was going to link to today are hosted by tumblr, which has been offline since yesterday after a catastrophic database cluster failure. Luckily, the rest of the web is still standing:

tumblr have been trading handbags with 4chan recently, the downtime is probably some sort of retaliation for tumblr flooding 4chan with pictures of Kittens again

[RichardCranium]

I have wasted the past 3½ hours following links from links from links, etc. from the above.

And The Road Printer reminds me of the road building machine in Thunderbirds. I can't find a decent picture.

The machine is first visible here at 5 minutes and 15 seconds in:

Here's a couple of poor pictures.





I saw something very like that relaying the road surface on the A40 one night.

[d000hg]

You really want to be me, don't you?

If it makes you feel good about yourself, then yes. It can be my Christmas present to you.

[SupremeSpod]

Don't encourage them.... if I wanted this kind of stuff I'd read Spod's blog

You really want to be me, don't you?

[NickFitz]

What happened to 48?

It was a day late due to a blood clot in my left anterior descending coronary artery. Sorry

[rsingh]

What happened to 48?

[d000hg]

Get Off My Lawn - "Go ahead, get it off your chest. You know you want to." Excellent collection of rants by assorted people; it reads a bit like General on a good day: "You are the biggest bunch of entitlement-minded pussies ever. You wouldn’t know a hard day’s work if it stepped on you. Guess what, you morons…you gotta prove yourself just like everyone else. I REALLY don’t give a tulip if your Mom thinks you are pretty or smart. Until you prove it, you’re nothing but an insipid whiner that couldn’t find your way out of a box."

Don't encourage them.... if I wanted this kind of stuff I'd read Spod's blog

[chef]

at last, have been waiting all day for these

[NickFitz]

It turns out that no less than three of the sites I was going to link to today are hosted by tumblr, which has been offline since yesterday after a catastrophic database cluster failure. Luckily, the rest of the web is still standing:

• Spacelog - "Space exploration stories from the original transcripts." NASA has long made available transcripts of its space mission communication logs, but they were plain text and difficult to search or link to. Now, /dev/fort are converting the logs to properly hyperlinked documents; up so far are Mercury 6 and Apollo 13. The key moment of the latter's mission is here.
  
  
• Up and then Down: The lives of elevators - "Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete." Nick Paumgarten tells us more than one might have expected there to be to say about lifts.
  
  
• Beatles 3000 - "Even 1000 years after they’ve died, the world will still remember the incredible talent of John, Paul, Greg, and Scottie." Amusing video from Scott Gairdner imagining how The Beatles will be remembered in the year 3000.
  
  
• Get Off My Lawn - "Go ahead, get it off your chest. You know you want to." Excellent collection of rants by assorted people; it reads a bit like General on a good day: "You are the biggest bunch of entitlement-minded pussies ever. You wouldn’t know a hard day’s work if it stepped on you. Guess what, you morons…you gotta prove yourself just like everyone else. I REALLY don’t give a tulip if your Mom thinks you are pretty or smart. Until you prove it, you’re nothing but an insipid whiner that couldn’t find your way out of a box."
  
  
• 50 Secrets Your Pilot Won't Tell You - "We asked 17 pilots from across the country to give us straight answers about maddening safety rules, inexplicable delays, the air and attitudes up there—and what really happens behind the cockpit door." As one might expect, things are just as messed up up there as in the typical workplace down here.
  
  
• Press the Magic Button: My "one strike" rule for Twitter/Flickr and why you shouldn’t be offended when someone blocks you - "I care a lot about a very small group of people. I maintain a hierarchy of who I need to be okay with. It starts with my wife Heather, my parents and my sister, and includes my clients and a very short list of friends. You know who’s not on that list? Anonymous internet commenters. For them and everyone else not on the list, I just try to remember a saying I heard once: 'Your opinion of me is none of my business.'" Derek Powazek on the benefits of blocking.
  
  
• Remember the Kakapo – 3 reasons why large companies on the web are losing ground - "Right now every large company struggles to hire great developers, to innovate and to retain their talent... here are the three main reasons." Good analysis from my friend and erstwhile colleague Christian Heilmann on the occasion of his leaving Yahoo! to work at Mozilla.
  
  
• Optical illusions: autostereograms and sociopaths - "The mind muscle that controls mental focus is coaxed into relaxing. In the hands of an experienced sociopath, we do this unknowingly. Their goal is for us to transpose reality (the flat 2D nature of their shallow lives) for a mirage (their fictitious 3D image of accomplishment, success, bravery, generosity, integrity, etc.)... We are taught to not only see their mirage, but transpose it for reality—and keep transposing it until we forget what the reality ever was. The more relaxed your focus, the more intense and real the mirage will become." Kenneth Royce examines the techniques sociopaths use to manipulate those around them.
  
  
• The Road Printer - "...a new street-printing device—unfurling a geological substrate known as Tiger Stone, as orderly and as easy 'as laying laminate flooring'—can neatly place brick roads where there weren't roads before." I would have no use for a machine like this, but I still want one
  
  
• Liam's Pictures from Old Books - "Over 2,880 high-resolution free images scanned from more than 160 different old or rare books, with extracts, by Liam Quin." Fine collection of all kinds of imagery.

Happy invoicing!