Monday Links from the Holding Pen vol. LVII

[RichardCranium]

A bloke I worked with at the MoD in the mid 1990s used to go banging on about the Caspian Sea Monster and desperate to see the UK developing them commercially.

I don't understand why huge ground-effect aircraft aren't being used to ship containers of fruit and other perishables.

They are far more fuel-efficient than normal aircraft, also, you're a lot less likely to die in a crash so are suitable for fearful passengers.

Especially since they can fly across flat land - huge areas of Australia, Africa and North America Asia are suitable.

I cannot see why they have not caught on commercially.

[NickFitz]

That Ekranoplan is just daft - in an awesome kind of way.

Here's some footage of it in action - skip to around 8:26

[zeitghost]

I was studying in the Eng dept at the place on the seafront in the early nineties and remember rumours of plod raiding offices from Elec Eng.

I know that people here (presumably the ones mentioned in THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB: Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters - The National Interest, Winter, 1995/96 ) failed to match the photographs they were shown with the chap who attended the course.

[Pondlife]

Happened long long long before I joined this illustrious organization.

And before PICs.

Z80s in those days.

I was studying in the Eng dept at the place on the seafront in the early nineties and remember rumours of plod raiding offices from Elec Eng.

[Bunk]

I couldn't possibly comment.

Flipping heck Zeity. Didn't you wonder why he spent all his time playing Flight Sim when he should have been engaging in the wonders of PIC programming?

[dang65]

"Working" as I do in eyer edjumakashun, this is a perrenial worry.

What, that they won't be able to repay their student loans?

[Pondlife]

"Working" as I do in eyer edjumakashun, this is a perrenial worry.

Which came true some years ago, though it's debatable whether or not the alleged miscreant really had his identity stolen & ended up buried in some desert while some one else did the dirty.

Ho hum.

Ramzi Yousef?

One of yours?

[ctdctd]

Thanks Nick - glad to see you haven't abandoned us.

That Ekranoplan is just daft - in an awesome kind of way.

[thunderlizard]

If you want to see Barra airport (the UK's only tidal airport) in action, get your Horlicks ready and put your slippers on, because it's on this week's episode of An Island Parish.

[NickFitz]

• How to Disagree - "The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts... If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages." Paul Graham defines a Hierarchy of Disagreement.
  
  
• Why are so many would-be terrorists engineers? - "What links the following people: the Nigerian who wanted to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day; the two Palestinians arrested at Be'er Sheva's Central Bus Station and who are suspected of reconnoitering for a mass terror attack; Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj, leader of the killers of Anwar Sadat; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, planner of the attack on the Twin Towers; Mohamed Atta, who commanded the attack; and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?" The headline kind of gives away the answer.
  
  
• RC Explorer: New Video! - David Windestål uses a remote-control model helicopter equipped with roman candles to shoot down hydrogen-filled balloons. What could be better than that?
  
  
• Airport Luggage Carousels — an Informative Worldwide Report for Airline Travelers - "When arriving at your destination after a long flight, you have much on your mind... We take one concern off your mind. As you are waiting by the carousel, you will be wondering which way should you be looking for your bags. You can prepare for this ahead of time using our Worldwide Report on Airport Luggage Carousels — Clockwise or Counterclockwise." The Dull Men's Club has a lot of other useful information besides this list of airport luggage carousel configurations (which includes the delightful entry "Barra (BRR) - none - luggage put on sand on beach").
  
  
• Homebrew CPU - Following on from last week's 4-bit adder, here's a chap named Paul Krazak who's designing and building a CPU from scratch: "The design will all be done using (effectively) pencil and paper. Not because there isn't automation software available, but because there's something visceral and interesting about getting down to basics."
  
  
• Экраноплан "Лунь" проект 903 (tr. Ekranoplan "Lun" Project 903) - Excellent three-part gallery (Part 2: Interior, Part 3: Dock) of photos of the Lun class Ekranoplan MD-160, a surface-effect vehicle fitted with three pairs of cruise missiles, now lying unused at a naval station in Kaspiysk:
  
  
  
  
  
• Journal of Universal Rejection - "The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected." Now you, too, can say that you have had a paper rejected by an academic journal
  
  
• How the Atari ST almost had Real Unix - Landon Dyer ("Not the college football star, but the aging, degenerate and decrepit video game and systems software hacker who’s been polluting the Internet since before it was called the Internet") reminisces about his time at Atari: "The Tramiels had somehow wrangled a license for AT&T’s SVR-something-or-other version of Unix (might have been SVR3, but this was in the bad old days when AT&T was actively ******* up Unix, and it could have been just about any version, including SVR666). The license was for a mind boggling, nay, jaw-dropping ten bucks a seat. The problem was that the ST didn’t have any kind of memory management hardware, just a raw CPU flinging real addresses at naked DRAM, and the machine’s cheap-ass vanilla 68000 was incapable of recovering from a fault unless you cheated."
  
  
• Insolitology - "Welcome to Insolitology, the site about web oddities. Some people say that humour is only veiled derision - here at Insolitology, all of our derision is explicit." Alleee and Franc look at a number of Internet crackpots, amongst other things.
  
  
• The Nietzsche Family Circus - "The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote. Refresh the page to see a new comic and share your favorites by clicking permalink."

Happy invoicing!