Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. CCXXVII

[quackhandle]

Fogotten Employee, lovely stuff.

Only shame reading it on the bench could have read that at my leisure at client site whilst "waiting for a backup to complete".

qh

[OwlHoot]

Not if the Detroit office is a backwater.

After GM's ignition switch recall most people, including many Americans, would sooner saw off their genitals with a rusty spoon than buy a GM car.

So I imagine most of their offices are backwaters these days.

[doodab]

General Motors most likely.

Not if the Detroit office is a backwater.

[BrilloPad]

I'm not - I do have more sense. I'm at home, still in my dressing gown

My audience, however…

Is at the mental image you have just put in their head?

[OwlHoot]

This is brilliant.

Trying to think what the dozy company could be. General Motors most likely.

[doodab]

[*]Forgotten Employee - A strange little tale of a life in management: "Apparently, a new Vice President had decided to delegate the responsibilities that once were mine to another department. Immediately frightened for my job and my well being, I was tempted to scream out - yet, thankfully, I remained silent. I continued to come into the office on time every day, picked up the random pieces of my old job that were left scattered in the transition, and waited for the word. That, my friends, was 4 months ago to the day... It hit me this morning that perhaps all of my endless toil and hard work has landed me here. I've transferred so much within the company that all paperwork on me has been long since misplaced. I exist only in a computer program that spits out a 4 digit paycheck to my bank account every other thursday - just another tick on the underbelly of the corporate warthog. Too senior to be fired, too misunderstood to be bothered, I am truly the forgotten employee."

This is brilliant.

[NickFitz]

You're on the M5 at the end of a sunny bank holiday? I thought you'd have more sense

Oh God, just thought - I'll be on the M5 a lot from about a month's time!

I'm not - I do have more sense. I'm at home, still in my dressing gown

My audience, however…

[OwlHoot]

Time to stop seeking updates from the Highways Agency website, accept that the traffic on the M5 won't start moving anytime soon, and read this lot with what remains of your battery

You're on the M5 at the end of a sunny bank holiday? I thought you'd have more sense

Oh God, just thought - I'll be on the M5 a lot from about a month's time!

[NickFitz]

Time to stop seeking updates from the Highways Agency website, accept that the traffic on the M5 won't start moving anytime soon, and read this lot with what remains of your battery

• The Moral Alignment Of Jeeves and Wooster - Dungeons and Dragons moral alignments, as they apply to the characters of P.G. Wodehouse: "A lawful evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty, and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion... Wodehouse’s Lawful Evils: The Efficient Baxter, Honoria Glossop, Watkyn Bassett, Roderick Spode, G. D’Arcy “Stilton” Cheesewright, Florence Craye, Julia Ukridge, Laura Pyke."
  
  
• The Conjuring of The Mirage - How Steve Wynn's vision of a new kind of Las Vegas resort was brought to fruition, and changed the course of business in the city: “Designing The Mirage took one year of R & D and three years of further development,” Wynn says. “Nothing was conceived in one brilliant stroke. It was done an inch at a time, step by step. If every idea we explored was reduced to paper, it would fill a warehouse.”
  
  
• The Best of London's Breweries - "Six years ago you could count the capital’s breweries on one hand; by the beginning of 2014 there were over 50. Well-branded, locally brewed craft beers are now served in every self-respecting London drinking hole, and a handful of entrepreneurial breweries have started running tours on the side. As a keen ale drinker, I set out on a mission to visit the breweries that are dutifully keeping Londoners so well oiled." A good selection of ale-creating places to visit when the National Gallery just won't cut it.
  
  
• Infectious diseases: Smallpox watch - "The body, which had probably been buried in the cemetery of a nearby church, turned out to be a mid-19th-century mummy — of an African-American woman dressed in a nightshirt and socks who had been exceptionally well preserved by her ornate iron coffin. The find struck the forensics team as odd: a black woman in the mid-1800s was unlikely to have been able to afford such a luxurious resting place... Then the examiners noticed the lesions and raised bumps that covered the corpse. The marks reminded Bradley Adams, New York City's chief of forensic anthropology, of photos he had seen of smallpox victims. The pricey coffin with its airtight seal, the scientists realized, might have been meant not to preserve the body of a wealthy individual but to quarantine an infection. “We took a step back,” says Warnasch." There's a potential for discovering more about the evolution of the smallpox virus by extracting DNA from such remains, and other places where it may still lurk.
  
  
• The Secret Messages Inside Chinese URLs - "To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than Latin characters... The URL for the massive e-commerce site Alibaba, for example, is 1688.com, pronounced “yow-leeyoh-ba-ba”—close enough!"
  
  
• The Horrible Bosses of Hollywood - "It sounds so glamorous, working in Hollywood. Doesn't it? Sure, if you're a studio chief or an actor with your own trailer. But if you're a powerless minion, it's a special kind of hell." Jim Nelson's memories of working as a writers' assistant include a bizarre scene that could have come straight out of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One.
  
  
• CORONA Atlas of the Middle East - "CORONA is the codename for the United States’ first photographic spy satellite mission, in operation from 1960-1972. During that time, CORONA satellites took high-resolution images of most of the earth’s surface... In regions like the Middle East, CORONA imagery is particularly important for archaeology because urban development, agricultural intensification, and reservoir construction over the past several decades have obscured or destroyed countless archaeological sites and other ancient features such as roads and canals. These sites are often clearly visible on CORONA imagery, enabling researchers to map sites that have been lost and to discover many that have never before been documented." And as we all know, any data that can be integrated with Google Maps, will be integrated with Google Maps; so here they are
  
  
• Forgotten Employee - A strange little tale of a life in management: "Apparently, a new Vice President had decided to delegate the responsibilities that once were mine to another department. Immediately frightened for my job and my well being, I was tempted to scream out - yet, thankfully, I remained silent. I continued to come into the office on time every day, picked up the random pieces of my old job that were left scattered in the transition, and waited for the word. That, my friends, was 4 months ago to the day... It hit me this morning that perhaps all of my endless toil and hard work has landed me here. I've transferred so much within the company that all paperwork on me has been long since misplaced. I exist only in a computer program that spits out a 4 digit paycheck to my bank account every other thursday - just another tick on the underbelly of the corporate warthog. Too senior to be fired, too misunderstood to be bothered, I am truly the forgotten employee."
  
  
• What's It Like to Consult for The Big Bang Theory? - Interview with David Saltzberg, astrophysicist and science consultant to the show since its inception: "The whiteboards the characters use for equations have actually changed into something where real scientists pitch me their latest results and ask if they can appear on them... The big discovery of gravitational waves, which indicated cosmological inflation, got a special place. It appeared on Stephen Hawking’s board, which of course is a much higher level than our main characters’ boards. That was actually vetted by Hawking himself. The producers didn’t want to put something on his board that he wouldn’t be comfortable with, so they took what I had suggested and sent a picture to him. He said he liked it."
  
  
• The 3D Petrie Project - "Since 2009, The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, in collaboration with UCL's Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering and business partner Arius 3D, has been developing a groundbreaking programme for creating 3D images of objects in the Petrie collection." And here some of them are, as 3D models you can view and manipulate in your browser:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!