Monday Links from Very Near the Bench Vol. LXXIX

[AlfredJPruffock]

Cheers AJP

May be back to daytime posting next week though...

Nothing lasts for long NF - as one contract ends - another begins.

We shall all be fine - so kick back and relax.

[NickFitz]

Ah -the highlight of the Monday evening- Capital-NF-Capital !!!

Cheers AJP

May be back to daytime posting next week though...

[AlfredJPruffock]

Ah -the highlight of the Monday evening- Capital-NF-Capital !!!

[NickFitz]

Final week on this gig

This means that, unless I manage to get something sorted out this week, I'll have some time to replenish my stocks of stuff like this:

• And that’s why you should learn to pick your battles. - A row about towels proves that Victor hasn't learnt very much in fifteen years of marriage to "The Bloggess" Jenny: "...as Victor gave me a kiss goodbye he lovingly whispered, 'You are not allowed to bring any more goddam towels in this house or I will strangle you'. And that was exactly what I was still echoing through my head an hour later, when Laura and I stopped our shopping carts and stared up in confused, silent awe at a display of enormous metal chickens, made from rusted oil drums."
  
  
• Pruney fingers grip better - "Theory suggests wrinkling of wet digits evolved for a reason." Go ed
  
  
• Bagels: An American Tragedy - "The corruption of bagels is a snapshot of a civilization in decline... the bagel became a test case of how you make something commercially viable at the cost of everything that makes it good." Josh Ozersky is very serious about bagels.
  
  
• The 44 chromosome man and what he reveals about our genetic past - "A doctor in China has identified a man who has 44 chromosomes instead of the usual 46. Except for his different number of chromosomes, this man is perfectly normal in every measurable way... All the evidence points to humans, like their relatives the chimpanzees, having 48 chromosomes a million or so years ago. Nowadays most humans have 46."
  
  
• From Dust to Edge - "...is the documentation of a long journey in the efforts of making a blade out of homemade steel. My interest in blades started with the legendary Japanese katana and as a result of wanting to learn more about how they were made I ended up becoming a bladesmith." Jesus Hernandez is very serious about making his own blade; he starts by building a smelter and getting some iron ore...
  
  
• Hemingway, Hounded by the Feds - "EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life." His friend A. E. Hotchner remembers Hemingway's conviction in his final days that the FBI were watching him - an apparent paranoid delusion which turned out to be true.
  
  
• ‘Cows Eat Grass’ and Other Inflammatory Statements - "Cows eat grass. You wouldn’t think it’s a big deal to state this, but at Iowa State University a highly qualified job applicant who had the temerity to voice this simple biological fact was ejected from consideration for a post leading a sustainable agriculture program..." Apparently, Iowa grows a lot of corn for cattle feed.
  
  
• Why does the other lane always seem to go faster? - "Because it does go faster. Well, not always, but more often than your own lane is faster." Finally, statistics and probability confirm what you knew all along.
  
  
• How TV Superchef Jamie Oliver's 'Food Revolution' Flunked Out - How Jamie Oliver failed to take the US by storm with his school dinners campaign: "The reality behind 'Food Revolution' is that after the first two months of the new meals, children were overwhelmingly unhappy with the food, milk consumption plummeted and many students dropped out of the school lunch program, which one school official called 'staggering.' On top of that food costs were way over budget, the school district was saddled with other unmanageable expenses, and Jamie's failure to meet nutritional guidelines had school officials worried they would lose federal funding and the state department of education would intervene."
  
  
• Rectified Flowers - "This is what you would see if you were doing panoramic imaging from inside a flower..." Golan Levin's article includes links to the software used and so forth, or you can go and look at the complete Flickr set to see examples such as turning this:
  
  
  
  
  into this:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!