A weekly collection of links lovingly curated by Colin Wright.
Nukes, Nubs And Coners: The Unique Social Hierarchy Aboard A Nuclear Submarine
“Living in a machine with over 100 sailors requires a person to be flexible socially and sometimes physically. I spent two decades on United States Navy submarines performing sonar duties among eccentric personalities in incredibly stressful situations. When sailors report to their first submarine, they are joining a work culture unlike any other. Surrounded by crew members busily moving about tight spaces and narrow walkways, announcements over the circuit boxes, roving watchstanders, equipment humming to 400hz fans, it can be anxiety-inducing to any sailor.”
The Coast-To-Coast Road Trip is 120 Years Old
“The coast-to-coast road trip, that American essential, turns 120 this year. In 1903, Horatio Jackson and Sewall Crocker became the first people ever to drive a car from one side of the U.S. all the way to the other. Cars were an exciting novelty at the time, and their numbers were exploding — from 8,000 in 1900 to 32,920 in 1903 — but many still considered the “horseless carriage” a passing fad. There were few suitable roads, let alone a nationwide road network. So theirs was an adventure like none before. And it all started with a $50 bet.”
Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence
“Now displayed at the Louvre, pieced back together after a group of Bedouins protesting the Ottoman occupation smashed the stele, a visitor can see the characteristic dot of an end-stop after each word of the inscription. Though the anonymous scribe who chiseled this message nine centuries before the Common Era used the period in a way that we’d find idiosyncratic—the marks separating every individual word rather than ending individual syntactical units—it’s still clearly and obviously the same punctuation mark with which you’ll see at the end of this line. The Mesha Stele is, as such, the oldest example of writing to contain punctuation. No doubt the Moabite’s periods were used to interrupt the so-called scriptio continua of ancient writing wherebywordswouldbemergedtogetherinamannerthat’sdifficulttoread.”
Private Armies Are Making a Killing
“In many ways, Wagner’s emergence from the shadows symbolises the changing nature of modern warfare, in which the traditional Clausewitzian paradigm — based on a clear distinction between public and private, friend and enemy, civil and military, combatant and non-combatant — has given way to a much messier reality, in which state armies now regularly fight alongside private and/or corporate paramilitary and mercenary groups. Today’s conflicts, even when violent in nature, often occur in a “grey zone” below the threshold of conventional military action; adversarial states increasingly confront each other through proxies or surrogates — including private armies — rather than through their own armed forces. And this is not just a Russian issue: the increasingly central role of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in modern warfare is a global phenomenon.”
Mathematicians Find Hidden Structure in a Common Type of Space
“The study of designs can be traced back to 1850, when Thomas Kirkman, a vicar in a parish in the north of England who dabbled in mathematics, posed a seemingly straightforward problem in a magazine called the Lady’s and Gentleman’s Diary. Say 15 girls walk to school in rows of three every day for a week. Can you arrange them so that over the course of those seven days, no two girls ever find themselves in the same row more than once? Soon, mathematicians were asking a more general version of Kirkman’s question: If you have n elements in a set (our 15 schoolgirls), can you always sort them into groups of size k (rows of three) so that every smaller set of size t (every pair of girls) appears in exactly one of those groups?”
How Big Is Mexico?
“Mexico is a nation in the southern part of North America. It is bordered to the north by the U.S., to the southeast by Belize and Guatemala. Mexico is a vast country. It covers almost 2 million square kilometers (~762 thousand sq mi), making it the global’s 13th-biggest nation by area. Moreover, Mexico is a tenth-most-populous nation (about 129 million citizens) and the most populated Spanish-speaking country. Mexico doesn’t look big on maps that have a Mercator projection due to distortion. The maps below clearly convey the real size of this country.”
Has the Fountain of Youth Been in Our Blood All Along?
“This Lego test indirectly measures those physical changes by monitoring his behavior. When mice of a certain age become forgetful, they spend more time checking out little trinkets they’ve seen before—objects that should warrant only a quick “Oh yeah, that thing again” glance. Cameras and laser-based detectors mounted on the ceiling capture and quantify those pauses and vacillations.”
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