Monday Links from the Bench vol. CXCVII

[NickFitz]

• How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts - Detailed breakdown of the process by which the FBI tracked down Ross Ulbricht, currently detained on allegations that he is the Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of illicit BitCoin-fuelled marketplace Silk Road: "Yesterday, Ulbricht left his apartment to visit the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library in the southern part of the city. Library staff did not recognize him as a regular library patron, but they thought nothing of his visit as he set up his laptop in the science fiction section of the stacks. Then, at 3:15pm, staffers heard a "crashing sound" from the sci-fi collection and went to investigate, worried that a patron had fallen. Instead, library Communications Director Michelle Jeffers tells us that the staff came upon "six to eight" FBI agents arresting Ulbricht and seizing his laptop. The agents had tailed him, waiting for the 29-year-old to open his computer and enter his passwords before swooping in. They marched him out of the library without incident." In case you're wondering why setting up a website would get you arrested: there's also the small matter of him paying an undercover FBI agent $80,000 to kill someone...

And so it begins:

BBC News - Four UK men arrested over Silk Road links

First British Silk Road suspects arrested by new National Crime Agency - Telegraph

And lots of nervous surprisingly upbeat people on the Silk Road subreddit: "Four men arrested in UK over role in Silk Road... More arrested expected in coming weeks..." : SilkRoad

[jmo21]

This is my friends daughters.

wait but why: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

They won't go to college or university as there is no course special or fun enough for them.
They won't get a job as jobs are boring and stifle their incredibleness.

It's your friends fault, plain and simple!

[d000hg]

I added the Codex to my XMas list...

[DimPrawn]

codex seraphinianus



Pah, he's just copying Jeremy Clarkson.

[vetran]

these are quite a good watch

BBC Two - Filthy Cities

Getting down and dirty in the muck of the past
Getting down and dirty in the muck of the past
Do you have to dodge the contents of bedpans or step over rotting corpses on your way to work? Well, you may have had to if you’d lived in London, New York or Paris back when they were filthy cities. In this immersive new series Dan Snow brings these cities’ stinking histories vividly to life from the bottom up.

the 3 foot high frozen poop pile amused me.

[DimPrawn]

This is my friends daughters.

wait but why: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

They won't go to college or university as there is no course special or fun enough for them.
They won't get a job as jobs are boring and stifle their incredibleness.

[NickFitz]

Second week of freedom; once these are posted, I suppose I ought to start doing the various things I thought I'd get done once I had some free time

• Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy - "Lucy is part of Generation Y, the generation born between the late 1970s and the mid 1990s. She's also part of a yuppie culture that makes up a large portion of Gen Y. I have a term for yuppies in the Gen Y age group—I call them Gen Y Protagonists & Special Yuppies, or GYPSYs. A GYPSY is a unique brand of yuppie, one who thinks they are the main character of a very special story. So Lucy's enjoying her GYPSY life, and she's very pleased to be Lucy. Only issue is this one thing: Lucy's kind of unhappy." Wait But Why explains how a generation raised on unreasonable expectations and a sense of entitlement get unhappy when they bump up against the realities of the world. HT to cojak for this one
  
  
• Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark - "Thirty-three-year-old Daryush Valizadeh, known to his predominantly heterosexual male fan base as Roosh, is a well-known pick-up artist within the worldwide “Seduction Community,” which relies on pop evolutionary psychology to teach the art of getting laid. Its origins date back to dubious neuro-linguistic programming “speed seduction” theories in the early 1990s, but the Community rose to prominence with investigative reporter Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller exposé 'The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists'... But Roosh’s Denmark directory diverges from his usual frat-boy Casanova fantasies liberally seasoned with rape jokes... What’s blocking the pussy flow in Denmark? The country’s excellent social welfare services. Really." Speaking of a self-centred sense of entitlement, it turns out being an asshole about women doesn't really work in an egalitarian society
  
  
• How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts - Detailed breakdown of the process by which the FBI tracked down Ross Ulbricht, currently detained on allegations that he is the Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of illicit BitCoin-fuelled marketplace Silk Road: "Yesterday, Ulbricht left his apartment to visit the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library in the southern part of the city. Library staff did not recognize him as a regular library patron, but they thought nothing of his visit as he set up his laptop in the science fiction section of the stacks. Then, at 3:15pm, staffers heard a "crashing sound" from the sci-fi collection and went to investigate, worried that a patron had fallen. Instead, library Communications Director Michelle Jeffers tells us that the staff came upon "six to eight" FBI agents arresting Ulbricht and seizing his laptop. The agents had tailed him, waiting for the 29-year-old to open his computer and enter his passwords before swooping in. They marched him out of the library without incident." In case you're wondering why setting up a website would get you arrested: there's also the small matter of him paying an undercover FBI agent $80,000 to kill someone...
  
  
• Why Malcolm Gladwell Matters (And Why That's Unfortunate) - Christopher Chabris considers the validity, or otherwise, of Gladwell's assertions: "...the reason I take him seriously is because I take him and his publisher at their word. On their face, many of the assertions and conclusions in Gladwell's books are clearly meant to describe lawful regularities about the way human mental life and the human social world work... Note, incidentally, that he mentions coherence, consistency, and neatness. But not correctness, or proper evidence. Perhaps he thinks that these are highfalutin cares for writers and critics, or perhaps he is some kind of postmodernist for whom they don't even exist in any cognizable form."
  
  
• The Year The Army Stopped Niagara Falls - "In 1969, the Army Corps of Engineers accomplished an awesome feat: They turned off Niagara Falls. They did it to clean up the area, and check for structural integrity. Here are pictures of this bizarre episode in structural engineering history." HT to SimonMac for this. Related: March 30, 1848: Niagara Falls Runs Dry - "An American farmer out for a stroll shortly before midnight on March 29 was the first to notice something. Actually, he noticed the absence of something: the thundering roar of the falls. When he went to the river’s edge, he saw hardly any water. Came the dawn of March 30, people awoke to an unaccustomed silence. The mighty Niagara was a mere trickle."
  
  
• Extra! Recordings of English newspaper sellers - From The London Sound Survey: "The cries of newspaper sellers were common signifiers of the bustle of urban life but they’ve declined greatly with the advent of free papers, among other factors. So I was very intrigued when Paul Byrne approached me at the Caught By The River stage in Oympic Park in July. Paul told me he had a curious promotional flexi disc consisting of newspaper sellers’ cries and would I like to have it?"
  
  
• Badass of the Week: Trấn Hưng Đạo - Following last week's death, at the age of 102, of Viet Minh general Vo Nguyen Giap, here's the story of a Vietnamese military leader who kicked Kublai Khan's arse: "For centuries the kings and queens of the land known as Dai Viet had fought a never-ending death feud with the Emperors of China, and the Vietnamese are a tough, resilient group of people living in a borderline-inhospitable death-jungle –these guys were no stranger to battling back invasion, and Tran Hung Dao wasn't going to let them start bending over and taking it on his watch. Tran responded by busting out a total mega pump-up speech so hardcore it would have given George S. Patton a boner, ripped his shirt off Hulkamania-style, and then sent the Mongol emissary back to his masters with a Vietnamese arrow sticking out of his eye (and a giant erect penis drawn on his chest in purple Sharpie)."
  
  
• A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash - Interview with Robin Nagle, who rejoices in the title of Anthroplogist in Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation: "In its early days, the department didn’t really function at all. There are some photographs taken for Harper’s Weekly, before and after photos of street corners in New York in 1893 and then in 1895. And the before pictures are pretty astonishing, people were literally shin-high or knee-high in this muck that was a combination of street gunk, horse urine and manure, dead animals, food waste, and furniture crap."
  
  
• Codex Seraphinianus: A new edition of the strangest book in the world - "In October Rizzoli will be republishing what is regarded by many to be the strangest book in the world, the Codex Seraphinianus. The Codex is unlike other historically well-known strange books (such as the Voynich Manuscript), in that the author of the book is not only known (Luigi Serafini is his name), he’s still alive. But the book is just so damned strange that it has accumulated a veritable industry of speculation about its meaning, deeper origins, and whether the language in which it is written actually has any syntax or not." Available to pre-order (isn't that the same as "order"?) for a mere £85
  
  
• This Charming Charlie - Peanuts comics with the dialog replaced by Smiths lyrics. Apparently Universal Music Publishing Group was trying to take the site down, until Morrissey voiced support for it
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!