Interesting Links for 11-05-2018

[andrewducker]

The strangest place people have written software

(tags: software weird )

Jeremy Thorpe: Who was the Liberal Party leader and what led to his spectacular fall from grace?

(tags: politics history liberal uk )

Is Iran really the world’s leading state sponsor of terror

(tags: Iran terrorism facts )

Salary transparency continues to be in everyone's interests except your boss'

(tags: transparentsociety salary money )

Making tiny swords out of nails (and large ones out of railroad spikes)

(tags: weaponry )

Reasons why babies cry

(tags: babies crying funny )

Digital photocopiers contain copies of everything they've seen. Companies sell them without wiping them

(tags: data Technology privacy fail )

Google Grapples with ‘Horrifying’ Reaction to Uncanny AI Tech

(tags: ai Google )

Solo: First Reactions Twitter Roundup

(tags: StarWars )

If you tell people they're seeing an advert because you're tracking them they like it less

(tags: advertising surveillance )

Scientists Stuffed a Crocodile Into an MRI Machine to See If It Likes Bach

(tags: crocodile music mri )

Positive parenting doesn't help children's friendships, but negative parenting harms them

(tags: children friendship parenting )

Flexible work arrangements reduce wage gap for mothers

(tags: wages inequality mother )

Stanford Study Shows the Productivity Boost of Working From Home

(tags: work productivity )

What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen?

(tags: ux design restaurant viaSwampers )

This Comic From 1919 Imagines What It’s Like to Have a Phone in Your Pocket

(tags: phones comic thefuture )

Comments

[randomdreams]

I used to make swords out of nails, by forging them to shape and sharpening them. I even made tiny hilts for them by learning to melt lead just enough so that it was barely liquid and dipping the back of the mini sword into the lead, exactly the way people dip candles. This was before my parents realized that lead vapors are a bad idea for ten year old kids.

[calimac]

Hugh Grant playing Jeremy Thorpe sounds like must-see TV for me, if only I could get it over the pond. But the article is mixed in with a lot of hype - no, Thorpe was not anywhere near the verge of becoming Foreign Secretary in 1974, let alone Prime Minister - and one astonishing statement, that he had the charisma of Nigel Farage.

Nigel Farage is charismatic???!!????

[anef]

Yes to Hugh Grant - I've always found him disappointing as a floppy-haired hero, but as a slightly sleazy, compromised, charismatic politician I think he'd be brilliant. And no, Farage is not charismatic.

[calimac]

You write in the conditional, suggesting that you have not, but should, see Hugh Grant in Florence Foster Jenkins and Bridget Jones's Diary. And also Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks, where he plays a cross between these two types of characters.

[anef]

I have seen Bridget Jones's Diary, but not the other two. I was also thinking of About a Boy where I thought he gave a very good performance.

[andrewducker]

Have you seen Restoration?

He has a minor role as a bitchy artist at the court of Charles II, and I thought he did a really good job.

[andrewducker]

Nigel Farage does nothing for me. But he clearly sways a large number of people whenever he speaks publicly.

[calimac]

"Politically persuasive" isn't the same thing as "charismatic." Joe McCarthy swayed a large number of people, but nobody ever called that dark, sweaty, mumbling figure charismatic, a term popularized for JFK, who never persuaded as many people as McCarthy did at his peak. I think you have to be physically attractive to be charismatic, though charisma is far from merely physical appeal. Nigel Farage looks like a frog.