Monday Links from the Mad Dash to the Pub vol. CXI

[TimberWolf]

Tempted to say "Christ, what an ...', but that wouldn't be funny Nice link on bacteria ecosystems.

[NickFitz]

I seem to have described a lot of things as "excellent". Ah well, I was in a rush

[NickFitz]

Time for dinner

• The Human Lake - "...when I arrived in San Francisco, walked up to the podium, and switched on my computer, I presented my audience with this photograph of a lake... For the next hour, I tried to convince them that their bodies are a lot like that lake, and that appreciating this fact could help them find new ways to treat diseases ranging from obesity to heart disease to infections of antibiotic-resistant bacteria." Excellent exploration of the history of microbiology by Carl Zimmer.
  
  
• Coding tricks of game developers - "If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?"
  
  
• Aliens, Guardian Angels and Double Glazing - Wonderfully strange stuff in the letters column of the Brighton Argus
  
  
• Context Free Art - "Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes." Get cracking
  
  
• How long does it take to eat Jesus? - "Hubby dearest just calculated how long it would take a Catholic to eat Jesus." He lasts a surprisingly long time.
  
  
• Beholding Holden - "Late last year, writer Mike Norris and artist David Richardson imagined the members of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family, a follow-up to their earlier exploration of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Here's their take on Salinger's most famous novel." Excellent article about, and paintings of the characters in, The Catcher in the Rye.
  
  
• Ham, Space Chimp - "Ham, space chimp was also known as Ham the Astrochimp, was the first hominid launched into space by the American space program. He was trained at Holloman Air Force Base."
  
  
• Under the Microscope - "Cambridge University's Under the Microscope is a collection of videos that capture glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up and convey the excitement of cutting-edge science in areas that range from beetle eyes to killer T-cells, from nano-wires to fish skeletons." Excellent library of videos.
  
  
• Sealab: America’s forgotten quest to live and work on the ocean floor - "Bond. George Bond. As the father of Sealab—the marine version of the U.S. space program—his is a name that ought to be familiar to Americans. Yet he remains largely unknown, in spite of the fact that his pioneering work enabled sea-dwelling divers to break age-old depth barriers—and revolutionized deep-sea exploration.
  
  
• Christ, It Works for Everything - "It was recently theorized that all New Yorker cartoons could be captioned with 'Christ, what an asshole' without compromising their comedic value. I discovered this is true of virtually all comics, old and new:"

Happy invoicing!