h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Misconceptions in Astronomical History
https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2019/04/24/great-wrong-ideas-in-astronomical-history/

Finally someone suggests replacing Stamp Duty with Capital Gains Tax on houses. Stamp Duty is a tax on moving to a different part of the country - it's a tax on opportunity. https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2020/jul/24/heres-an-idea-that-could-earn-the-government-400bn-in-25-years #ukpol

A review of a book about a book
https://sheenaghpugh.livejournal.com/131074.html

Cyberspace, cybersecurity, cybermen, cybereverything https://www.spacerogue.net/wordpress/?p=655

Squash plants growing up an A-frame

The Solar System, using the equivalent Greek gods:
- Hermes
- Aphrodite
- Gaia
- Ares
- Zeus
- Cronus
- Caelus
- Poseidon

Binary Coded Decimal, the strange world where 0x09 + 0x03 = 0x12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal

NHS IT: money is wasted on centralised IT, instead of letting hospitals fix the problems which are most important to them
https://ukcampaign4change.com/2020/06/09/nhs-it-more-wisdom-in-some-register-reader-comments-than-in-nao-report/ #ukpol

A map of every attempt to land on mars
https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/map-every-mars-landing-attempt.html #space

Plan S: those who fund scientific research will only allow publication in open-access journals. Academic publishers charge (a lot) for access, and don't pay the scientists or reviewers. Planned for 2020, it's delayed to 2021. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/07/open-access-with-a-vengeance

Spoof music video for Hall and Oats is full of happiness https://youtu.be/MtrBvE66XAA #music

Nice small tool to wait for an application to open and close a file. Similar to inotifywait from inotify-tools, but filtered by process name.
https://www.enricozini.org/blog/2020/debian/wait-until-a-command-opened-a-file/

The world now produces more seafood from fish farms than wild catch
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-aquaculture

Making smaller particle accelerators by using plasma wakefield acceleration
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-potential-of-plasma-wakefield-acceleration #physics

Book: The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. A sci-fi book from a Chinese perspective. #book

Privacy Badger from the EFF - automatically detects who tracks you, and blocks them https://privacybadger.org/

Music video includes soldering iron https://youtu.be/RaelLXKLlc8 #music

Other ways that spectre's incorrect branch prediction can cause problems - swapping the gs segment register at the wrong time. https://lwn.net/Articles/795637/ #cpu