Monday Links from the Bench vol. CXXIII

[BrilloPad]

Own up - who clicked on the 'cum box' picture link from the 'confessions'.

(I didn't, but I did think about it!)

Do people not just use tissues and flush them away afterwards?

I would love to start a thread asking if anyone else does similar. But I am worried about getting banned.

[NickFitz]

Own up - who clicked on the 'cum box' picture link from the 'confessions'.

(I didn't, but I did think about it!)

[mudskipper]

Own up - who clicked on the 'cum box' picture link from the 'confessions'.

(I didn't, but I did think about it!)

[BrilloPad]

I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets - D. C. Woods calculates the odds: "When my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get the comment, “but aren’t you a statistician?”. The implication is that only people who are ignorant of probability would play the lottery. I’ve also heard the belief that the lottery is a tax on poor people. I have a different view, that buying lottery tickets is perfectly rational for me."

Makes me feel alot better about buying lottery tickets.

[OwlHoot]

[*]Who Killed Men's Hats? Think Of A Three Letter Word Beginning With 'I' - "A hundred years ago... men didn't leave home without a hat." Robert Krulwich presents his theory as to why men's hats went out of fashion after the 1950s. ...

Very plausible theory, but other factors probably also played a part.

For example, before the discovery of effective antibiotics in the 40s people were obsessed by the risk of catching chills and pneumonia etc, and a bare head does lose a lot of heat (although arguably that doesn't explain why people wore hats in hot weather - Maybe a bare head would also risk sunstroke in the heat!).

Also, 100 years ago people were more formal in their greetings and, although it sounds absurd today, guys doffing their hats was a physical acknowledgment of a woman or social superior (and different kinds of hats indicated different social classes - like it or not, that's how things used to be).

[NickFitz]

I daresay you've all gone to the seaside to complain about the rain, but I'll leave this lot here for you to read as you miserably hug your LemSip when you get back:

• A delicious revision - "One of my most popular posts on Pinterest of late has been the Snicker's salad recipe I posted a while back... The updated recipe calls for instant vanilla pudding to be added and boy does it make a difference!" Snickers salad! (Well, Marathon salad really.) This is what healthy eating ought to be like, courtesy of Erica.
  
  
• Welsh Wallace: The beginning of a long journey - Welsh Wallace is an ex-servicewoman who lost her sight in an explosion while serving in Iraq in 2005. She's now writing about her experiences since that moment: "Over the coming blogs I will take you on my journey of the past seven years. The ups and downs I have faced. The laughter and the tears, and hope it will help others who are coming to terms with sight loss & PTSD. So please join me on what was to become the biggest journey of my life."
  
  
• Who Killed Men's Hats? Think Of A Three Letter Word Beginning With 'I' - "A hundred years ago... men didn't leave home without a hat." Robert Krulwich presents his theory as to why men's hats went out of fashion after the 1950s.
  
  
• I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets - D. C. Woods calculates the odds: "When my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get the comment, “but aren’t you a statistician?”. The implication is that only people who are ignorant of probability would play the lottery. I’ve also heard the belief that the lottery is a tax on poor people. I have a different view, that buying lottery tickets is perfectly rational for me."
  
  
• Reddit’s “What Secret Could Ruin Your Life if It Came Out?” Thread Is a Harrowing Descent Into the Darkest Reaches of the Human Soul - "A recent AskReddit thread titled Throwaway time! What’s your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out? got people creating temporary accounts, then confessing their deepest, darkest secrets... I hope to walk you through that gigantic thread, because there were so many weird confessions, and browsing the comments on Reddit is time-consuming. Consider this a highlight reel of car crashes, I guess. I’m your Virgil, guiding you through Hell and Purgatory. I’m not condoning any of this, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t fascinating." There was some seriously ****ed-up stuff on that thread: linky for those who feel like wading through it themselves. (It starts with "My secret is that I allowed my friend to kill himself, and everyone thinks I tried to save him. The reality is that I thought he was joking." )
  
  
• Preston Blair Lessons: Fundamentals of Animation Drawing - Preston Blair was a character animator at Disney, and later at MGM with Tex Avery. Here's a whole set of lessons in animation by JohnK, based on a rare tutorial book by Blair.
  
  
• Unblocking The Pirate Bay The Hard Way Is Fun For Geeks - It's trivially easy to get around the ludicrous court-imposed ban on UK access to the Pirate Bay, so let's try the hard way instead: "...there’s a point to making things harder than they need to be. One day – maybe next year, maybe five years on – censorship will be worse than it is now. Legislation like SOPA may have been defeated but it will be back, probably worse than ever. Preparing for the worst never hurts."
  
  
• A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi - "On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab some popcorn and enjoy this story." Good account of an important couple of years in the fledgling search industry by Diego Basch.
  
  
• The frequent fliers who flew too much - "There are frequent fliers, and then there are people like Steven Rothstein and Jacques Vroom. Both men bought tickets that gave them unlimited first-class travel for life on American Airlines. It was almost like owning a fleet of private jets." As you might expect, 35 years later the airline was in dire financial straits and looking for a way out of the deal it had struck; and, being the USA, that way inevitably led to court
  
  
• Wormworld Saga: Chapter 3: A Monstrous Forest - Daniel Lieske published the third chapter of his online graphic novel last Tuesday I linked to Chapter 1 in Monday Links LIV, and Chapter 2 in CIV: now he's been able to give up his day job and work on it full time it's only taken him a few months to produce a new chapter. He's also posted higher resolution, speech-bubble-free copies of some of the panels.

Happy invoicing!