Monday Links from the Barnyard vol. CCXVII

[zeitghost]

Just as well they didn't print the true reason for the absence of dinosaurs.

http://www.startrek.com/database_article/distant-origin

[NickFitz]

Forgot to sort these out yesterday (again), so that's my lunch break gone

• This Old Man - "I’m ninety-three, and I’m feeling great. Well, pretty great, unless I’ve forgotten to take a couple of Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I’ve begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb." Roger Angell on the benefits and discomforts of living to an advanced age.
  
  
• The White Shark Kayak Story - "When this photograph was first published in Africa Geographic, BBC Wildlife and later in Paris Match and the Daily Mail (London) it resulted in a flurry of e-mails, phone calls and letters from around the world asking if the image was a fake." Photographer Thomas P. Peschak explains how he came to take his classic photograph of a Great White Shark following a kayak.
  
  
• The Eyes Don’t Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming - "Proponents of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) claim that certain eye-movements are reliable indicators of lying. According to this notion, a person looking up to their right suggests a lie whereas looking up to their left is indicative of truth telling. Despite widespread belief in this claim, no previous research has examined its validity." So these people did examine its validity, and this is their paper demonstrating that it's bollocks
  
  
• Tunnel vision: how an obsessed explorer found and lost the world's oldest subway - "Bob Diamond had been guiding tours in an abandoned subway tunnel under Atlantic Avenue for almost 30 years when he was blindsided by a phone call from a New York Daily News reporter asking him how it felt to get kicked out... The next day, December 17th, 2010, Diamond got a letter from the Department of Transportation (DOT) informing him that his contract had been revoked."
  
  
• The Many-Worlds Hypothesis And The Hardest Super Mario Level - "In 2007, a Japanese youth hacked a version of Nintendo’s Super Mario World specifically to frustrate the goombas out of his friend. Distilled and translated from a longer Japanese title, this “Kaizo Mario World,” as it came to be known, was one of the first ultra-hard Super Mario hacks to make it around the world... For all the Kaizo playthroughs now on the web, one video in particular is fascinating to watch. It is a superimposition of the 134 total attempts required to complete a single level (only two attempts were successful). Not only is the video technically impressive, I think it can teach a fundamental interpretation of quantum mechanics." Interesting idea, but you just want to see the video, don't you?
  
  
  
  
  
• Awkward! 28 Cringe-Worthy Vintage Product Endorsements - "There’s a moment in your typical advertising brainstorm when the people charged with wrestling the creative elements to the ground cry uncle, settling on a clumsy compromise for the sake of getting on with the really important business—billing their clients. Or so these advertisements fronted by some rather improbable pitchmen and women would suggest." Product placement, from Roy Rogers with a railway for a penis to Bill Gates shopping at Radio Shack/Tandy.
  
  
• Burroughs in London - Heathcote Williams on his encounters with William Burroughs: "Bill had come to England from Tangier principally to take a heroin cure which he had set great store by. The cure had been devised by a Dr. John Yerbury Dent of the British Journal of Addiction... He insisted that Dr. Dent’s formula was working although I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed keen on a cough mixture called Breathe-Eezee which contained morphine."
  
  
• Six ways to spot if anti-drink stories are trying to mislead you - Beer writer Pete Brown explains the tactics used by the anti-drink brigade: "It struck me that rather than simply repeat what Chris said in an angrier fashion, it might be more useful for me at this point to share some of the tips I've learned over the years for reading through these claims in the first place. Most of them don't require you to do any extra reading, but do arm you with the healthy scepticism you need to read almost anything written about alcohol in the national press these days. (Many of them are also quite useful for any article on benefit scroungers, immigrants, urban foxes, or any other issue the Daily Mail is seeking to create a moral panic over.)"
  
  
• The Top Ten Weirdest Dinosaur Extinction Ideas - "Paleontologists, both professional and amateur, have dreamed up some bizarre explanations of how the dinosaurs disappeared from Earth."
  
  
• Who is Henry Kelly? - "Henry Kelly tells us all about himself with the aid of Going for Gold clues." The truth about the game show host:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!