Interesting Links for 19-01-2013

• Scottish storms resurrect World War 2 lard, delivers it to locals from the depths of the sea.
  (tags: scotland wwii food )
• Eastercon now has a code of conduct. (Sadly, I can't afford to go. A shame, as I was really looking forward to it.)
  (tags: behaviour conventions fandom )
• Widget Factories vs Film Crews - two models of organising teams. Very nice metaphor.
  (tags: work organisation viaHirez )
• How The Oculus Rift will change gaming. (Not convinced, but do really want to try one).
  (tags: technology gaming )
• Catholic hospital reportedly turning rape victims away
  (tags: catholicism germany rape )
• The Serif Readability Myth
  (tags: reading font )
• What if there was a robot apocalypse? How long would humanity last? (funny _and_ true)
  (tags: robots apocalypse )
• Leprosy spreads by reprogramming your cells.
  (tags: leprosy disease )
• We Must Choose Privacy Or Medical Breakthroughs
  (tags: privacy medicine science )
• Mathematicians aim to take publishers out of publishing
  (tags: mathematics academia )

How The Hobbit should have ended

(with bonus awesome song at the end. Which is now stuck in my head. GAH!)

My second-favourite arrangement of the Mission: Impossible theme

via nancylebov

My favourite being the Adam Clayton/Larry Mullen version.

(Why yes, I _am_ clearing out weeks of old tabs. Why do you ask?)

A question for people who understand the TV business

HBO have signed a 10-year exclusive deal with Universal.

Similarly Netflix and Disney have an exclusive deal.

Does this just cover paid-for streaming/Cable TV? Because it seems unlikely that Universal or Disney would want to lose either general broadcast TV showings, or their iTunes sales.

It turns out my job is surprisingly easy to explain in simple language.

Either that, or I'm used to explaining things to non-technical people!

Inspired by a flocked post elsewhere, I've written a description of my job using only the most common thousand words in the English language.

I work with computers. I talk to people about what they do in their jobs and how computers can make that easier or quicker.

Then I tell the computer what to do to help the people do the work.

I also tell other computer people how they can work together better, and what they can do to make sure that we work quickly and don't go wrong very often. I also check that we can make the computer work better later on without it being a lot more work.

Sometimes I talk to people from other parts of the business to make sure that we work with them as well as we can do.

I also make sure that other people who work in my area have someone to help if they have a problem with the people who manage us.

I wrote this with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, which was in turn inspired by this xkcd comic which explains the Saturn V using those same thousand words.