Monday Links from the Bench vol. XCIV

[Churchill]

Never mind "Ada", have you any links regarding her great-great granddaughter, Linda?

[NickFitz]

The leaves are finally falling outside, restoring my view of the pedestrian crossing. While I keep an eye on that, you can have a look at this lot:

• 50 of the World’s Best Breakfasts - "I love to eat breakfast, it’s the best meal of the day as far as I’m concerned. Pancakes, cereal, brunch, eggs, healthy breakfasts, greasy breakfasts, I’m not fussy. My only trouble is what to choose..." They eat some very odd stuff for breakfast in some countries. Sliced pork heart in semolina for you? (via voodooflux)
  
  
• How aliens can help you write off your debts - "Like all people who deal with correspondence from members of the public, I get letters from people with what you might call specialist concerns. I have at various times received ten page disquisitions on the Iraq war, tearful accusations of ruining someone’s intended career with the UN, and letters written in 4 point coloured type." @legalbizzle, an in-house lawyer for a bank, examines the strange ideas some people have about the law surrounding debt (complete with photo of Zeity tussling with the War Criminal).
  
  
• Fly with me over San Francisco in 1938 - Remarkably high quality aerial photography of SF. The complete collection is at David Rumsey's site.
  
  
• Hoping no-one dies at the North Korean fun fair! - "No matter how many blogs I manage to write about North Korea before I die, I'll never be able to hammer home just how much fun it is. And I say that even though I was once held ransom there, and on another occasion blacklisted and threatened by the government after they caught me taking the piss out of them in The Guardian. How could anyone not love the land that's home to the Mangyongdae fun fair, the world's tuliptiest, most depressing quasi-theme park? Everything in the Western World is so disappointingly competent these days." Excellent photos of this semi-derelict theme park with added coerce-a-mob "visitors" being herded in whatever direction the camera happens to point.
  
  
• Hacked! - James Fallows describes the chaos that ensued when his wife's Gmail account was cracked, and his subsequent dealings with Google, who are a lot more on the ball about this than they used to be: "After interviews at Google with staff members ranging from the senior officials who set security policy to the young engineers who had eventually figured out how to recover maliciously deleted e‑mail (including my wife’s), plus follow-up interviews elsewhere, I had three 'key takeaways,' as they say in the tech world. They involved the scale of the hacking problem, not just for individual users like us but for organizations; the nature of the arms race between people trying to steal or alter data and those trying to protect it; and the expectations of what citizens need to do to protect themselves."
  
  
• Do you want to sit down on the Overground during rush hour? Then prepare for war - "A few days ago, on an Overground train from Highbury to Kensington, I had a shocking experience – I failed to get a seat... I was good at getting seats. I’d learnt the ropes and tend to overanalyse behaviour on public transport, so it had never been a problem. But I’d been away for a few weeks and my seat-acquisition skills had gone beyond rusty – they were useless." Avoid this trauma with Brendan Nelson's tactical guide, complete with diagrams.
  
  
• God’s Blog - "UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out." God's creation (the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic one) is subjected to Internet commenters: "Not sure who this is for. Seems like a fix for a problem that didn’t exist."
  
  
• RGB Wall Art by Carnovsky - "Three overlapping and primary-colored patterns are placed on the wallpaper panels and, in normal light, create some major visual discord. But here’s where the magic happens: Shine a red, green, or blue light on the walls, and different patterns are isolated and made visible. Each colored light reveals its own set of images." Get decorating!
  
  
• Ain't too proud to beg - "Six stories of hardscrabble lives on the streets of Detroit." Detroitblogger John talks to the people behind the "Hungry and homeless" signs.
  
  
• The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage - Animator Sydney Padua has created (and continues to create, at random intervals) a series of comics illustrating an alternative reality in which Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace use the Difference Engine to fight crime! And save the economy, and stuff
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!