Monday Links from the Bench vol. CCXXIX

Posting from the bench again

Unfortunately the weather is unpleasantly warm today, but the Met Office promises a bit of continuous light drizzle for later in the week

The silencing of the Deaf - "Christine and Derek had to think about an issue that many parents never even contemplate: They had to decide which culture their daughter should be a part of. Ellie could join their world, the hearing world, if she received cochlear implants. Yet implants don’t work perfectly... What’s more, implants might cut Ellie off from a community that, some would argue, is her birthright: the Deaf world, where lack of hearing is an identity to be celebrated, not a disability to be cured."
olduse.net: a real-time historical exhibit - "Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago." Maybe in thirty years somebody will start replaying TPD. There are links to things like the FAQs but, for the main terminal in the centre, you'll need to work out how to navigate with the keyboard: "Take this as a good opportunity to learn to use hjkl to move around." Also, the web terminal is shared by everybody who's visiting the site, so you see what other people do, and they see what you do, and if there are a lot of you it'll get very confusing very fast (and may even grind to a halt). Why not find yourself a newsreader and point it at nntp:nntp.olduse.net instead?
So you want to write a generic ‘Birmingham isn’t that bad’ feature for a broadsheet… - "To start, lower expectations: Of Birmingham, not your article, silly. The best way to do this is point out that someone ‘right thinking’ said something bad. You could try doing a Google Books search for Birmingham to see if there are any literary quotations, or you could just use the Jane Austen quote... And if you like you can forget that it’s not Jane Austen who said it, but a character in Emma. A Character — Mrs Elton — that Jane Austen wrote as a voice of the fashionably stupid."
Minimum Viable Block Chain - Ilya Grigorik explains the block chain, which underlies such things as Bitcoin: "The block chain is agnostic to any "currency". In fact, it can (and will) be adapted to power many other use cases... What follows is an attempt to explain, from the ground up, why the particular pieces (digital signatures, proof-of-work, transaction blocks) are needed, and how they all come together to form the "minimum viable block chain" with all of its remarkable properties."
My Goodness! Guinness Collectors Snap Up Secret Stash of Unpublished Advertising Art - "The biggest cliché in the collecting world is the “discovery” of a previously unknown cache of stuff that’s been hidden away for years until one day, much to everyone’s amazement, the treasure trove is unearthed and the collecting landscape is changed forever... Cliché or not, that’s roughly what happened in 2008 when hundreds of artist John Gilroy’s oil-on-canvas paintings started to appear on the market. The canvases had been painted by Gilroy as final proofs for his iconic Guinness beer posters, the most recognized alcoholic-beverage advertisements of the mid-20th century." In 1936, they were still selling Guinness in Germany:
Pathfinding Demystified - Excellent tutorial on pathfinding algorithms by Gabriel Gambetta, going from a naive brute-force search to an explanation of how to create context-specific cost and goal functions: "Pathfinding is one of these topics that usualy baffles game developers. The A* algorithm in particular is poorly understood, and the general belief seems to be that it’s arcane magic... unlike a more academic approach, we’ll just skip search algorithms such as Depth-First or Breadth-First. Instead, we’ll try to go from zero to A* as quickly as possible."
Bob Dylan’s Da Vinci Code Revealed - "Researchers say they’ve uncovered more than 1,000 items lifted from other authors in Dylan’s Chronicles. And that’s just the beginning." As he's so widely revered as a great artist, they call it "a hidden metatext" rather than "plagiarism"
Bit Twiddling Hacks - Be your own Zeity, and get things done bitwise: "As of May 5, 2005, all the code has been tested thoroughly. Thousands of people have read it. Moreover, Professor Randal Bryant, the Dean of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has personally tested almost everything with his Uclid code verification system. What he hasn't tested, I have checked against all possible inputs on a 32-bit machine." Watch out for the unexpected consequences of using the XOR swap if source and destination are the same
Meet the Anonymous Instagram User Dedicated to Calling Out Rappers with Fake Watches - "FakeWatchBusta calls himself “The Horological Batman," a vigilante out there policing these internet streets keeping everyone safe from the scourge that is fake high-end timepieces... Armed with only an eye for detail and a smartphone, FWB puts anyone flossing a replica watch on blast. He’s had his accounts canceled, legal threats, and a lot of pissed off ballers, but he will not be stopped!"
Fantastic Fungi: The Startling Visual Diversity of Mushrooms Photographed by Steve Axford - "To think any one of these lifeforms exists in our galaxy, let alone on our planet, simply boggles the mind. " You can find more of Steve Axford's work on his Flickr account and SmugMug account.