If you're in my neck of the woods, be warned that I'm popping out to the shop in a bit, so it's going to rain 
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- She's Still Dying on Facebook - "It’s been five years since my best friend from high school died, but her death happens over and over online." Julie Buntin on the online traces we leave behind.
- Patching the Newton - Landon Dyer explains the technique he and other Apple engineers developed to allow firmware updates to the Newton, one of which then had to be applied in a hurry to machines in the stores for launch day: ”They lead me into into the back room, and there’s a cage with about twenty Newtons in it. It’s the first time I’ve seen one in an actual retail box. It’s kind of neat. We made this? Holy crap, people are about to buy them… There are perhaps a dozen of us spread out over the Boston metro area, patching Newtons that have somehow lost their minds. We don’t know the cause of the failure yet. We report serial numbers back to Cupertino. It’s the usual mode of operation of Newton; tulip happens, we fix it just in time, and there are unsung heros.”
- Porklife: building a better pig - "The birth of the modern pig is a love story of sorts, the tale of how a Western sow and an Eastern boar came to find one another." Sujata Gupta on the ongoing development of the modern pig.
- Top ten geek business myths - Some thoughts on your Plan B: ”A brilliant idea is neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful business, although all else being equal it can't hurt. Microsoft is probably the canonical example of a successful business, and it has never had a single brilliant idea in its entire history.”
- The Power of Two - Joshua Wolf Shenk considers Lennon and McCartney’s creative relationship: ”For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us, its shadow obscuring the way creative work really gets done. The attempts to pick apart the Lennon-McCartney partnership reveal just how misleading that myth can be, because John and Paul were so obviously more creative as a pair than as individuals, even if at times they appeared to work in opposition to each other.”
- The Lay of the Land - "I have a lot of questions. I blame the fact that I grew up in a fjord." Peter Richardson on relief maps.
- "Jaws" Is Ridiculous, Say Kids Who Owe Everything to "Jaws" - Ben and Emily Dreyfuss, children of Richard, consider some anomalies in that film with the shark: BD: ”Oh yeah, with his tony, rich boat that they should have taken to avoid the whole death/sinking thing?” ED: ”I mean, they don't even address that, which is ridiculous. Like, his boat had all the things they needed! Like sonar.” BD: ”Right? And Quint demands that they take his rickety piece of tulip which is just an insane thing to do. The only reasonable thing to say to Quint when he makes that demand is, "Sir, you are insane. We are not putting our lives in the hands of an insane person. You're fired. Good day."”
- Extinct Humans Passed High-Altitude Gene to Tibetans - "Tibetan people can survive on the roof of the world—one of the most inhospitable places that anybody calls home—thanks to a version of a gene that they inherited from a group of extinct humans called Denisovans, who were only discovered four years ago thanks to 41,000-year-old DNA recovered from a couple of bones that would fit in your palm."
- This is the actual hack that saved the astronauts of the Apollo XIII - Detailed explanation of the technique used to get CO2 scrubbers from the Command Module working in the Lunar Module, with photos of the finished job.
- Fitness quotes over pictures of drinking - Motivational sayings from the world of physical exercise, transferred to a more congenial context:
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