Monday Links from the Science Park vol. CXCIII

[doodab]

The best birthday gift! #girlfriends.

4 of them. Somehow I don't see ms doodab getting me that for my birthday.

[vetran]

http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/mis/3985247459.html

Wilmslow in Manhattan?

[NickFitz]

Discovered this morning that I have three more weeks here, not two Here's to calculating extensions by using calendar months, then rounding up to the following Friday!

• PinStruck - "PinStruck.com allows people like yourself to vent on their friends and enemies by sending them personalized voodoo curses via e-mail." Isn't it wonderful what you can do online these days?
  
  
• A View of the Earth - "From the Hubble Space Telescope. Which I nearly broke." Astronaut Michael Massimino trained for five years to repair Hubble, but just one screw made things a bit trickier than he'd anticipated.
  
  
• In praise of celestial mechanics - Of course, if the thing you need to fix is a few million miles away, it's even trickier. Here are some of the many and varied solutions engineers have devised to cope with distant problems, in "...a decades-long tradition of long-distance fixes, in which mission controllers restore stricken spacecraft to health, or extend their working lives, using a combination of technical skill, improvisation, good fortune—and the old standby of simply switching things off and on again and hoping for the best."
  
  
• Worldometers - "Real time world statistics."
  
  
• The Briefcase - "When a Wayland history teacher stumbled onto the papers of a deceased West Roxbury war veteran, he assigned his students to write the mystery man’s biography. What they found was Boston’s version of Forrest Gump." Martin W. Joyce was, amongst other things, an infantryman in the Great War, and post-liberation commander of Dachau concentration camp.
  
  
• BT Digital Archives project: A closer look at how 165 years of content were digitised - An interview with David Hay about the new BT Digital Archive: "The collection includes records of BT itself, its predecessor Post Office Telecommunications, and the private telegraph and telephone companies that the Post Office took over during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dating back to BT's first ancestor company – The Electric Telegraph Company founded in 1846."
  
  
• Walking London one postcode at a time - "Inspired by “the Ladies who Bus” who are travelling London one bus route at a time, and building on the work I have done to become a walking tour guide, this blog is about walking London one postcode at a time. There are over 100 London postcode districts so that should keep me busy!" Stephen is currently on SW10
  
  
• Missed Connection - m4w - "My stop was Union Square, but at Union Square I decided to stay on, rationalizing that I could just as easily transfer to the 7 at 42nd Street, but then I didn't get off at 42nd Street either. You must have missed your stop as well, because when we got all the way to the end of the line at Ditmars, we both just sat there in the car, waiting." Strange, rather beautiful post on Craigslist NY.
  
  
• Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of London’s Forgotten Australian Timber Roads - Not actually a Holmes story, but an interesting look at the wooden paving blocks used on many of Central London's roads until well into the 20th Century: "The use of wooden blocks to cover the streets of London had started in the 1840s, with the importation of Swedish softwoods, leading to a trade deficit with the Baltic region. Untreated yellow deal rotted and was quickly rutted by carriage wheels. Australian hardwoods – such as Jarrah and Karri Eucalyptus woods – started to be used in London from 1888."
  
  
• Crap Brapps - Collection of wretched brand-promoting mobile apps, with trenchant comments thereon: "Welcome to the Domestos Germ buster app. Play the germ buster game to destroy those ‘menacing nasties’ that lurk in your home and learn about the benefits of Domestos over thin bleach." "Play our game and learn about bleach? You are having a ******** laugh aren’t you?! To whoever approved this, you should seriously consider your place in society. Moron."
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!