Apparently the weather's getting warmer this week. I'll be hiding in the fridge if anybody wants me 
Happy invoicing!
- 7 CSI Fails - "As an expert witness in forensic pathology I see the CSI effect when I'm faced with questions like, "Why can't you tell us the precise time of death down to the minute, like on TV?" Potential jurors are now being asked if they watch NCIS, CSI, Bones, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and a plethora of other shows that depict police and other forensic professionals doing their jobs. So how close are these shows to reality? I'm here to tell you."
- Smelling Death: On the Job With New York's Crime-Scene Cleaners - "There is blood all over the room. It’s on the walls and it has seeped into the cracks in the floor. There are smears of it on the doorknob and bloody handprints on the lampshade, the light switch, and the walls. There is even a large pool of it congealed under a twin-sized bed, where the victim tried to hide. “That’s the thing about a bludgeoning,” says Doug Baruchin, president of Island Trauma Services, a crime-scene cleaning-company in Long Island, as he calmly explains the steps they took to clean up this particular scene, “The blood splatters everywhere.”" Saira Khan meets the people who clean up after the CSIs have left.
- Cynk Makes the Case for Buying Friends, Naked Short Selling - Matt Levine explains what appears to be an interesting variant on the standard pump & dump scam: ”It's beautiful, and I'm going to describe it to you in simplified form because for what do we live but to contemplate beautiful financial scams?”
- From A to B - Ingenious little project by Ruben van der Vleuten: ”What happens when you send something by mail? What happens in between you sending it off and someone else receiving it? What people and processes are involved and how many steps does it take?… I put a small camera in a box, build a timer circuit using Arduino and shipped it. That's as simple as it is. The timer circuit was set to make a 3 sec video every minute and make longer videos while the box was movin: to not miss on the 'interesting' parts.”
- How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained) - Kim-Mai Cutler considers the many factors that have resulted in modern San Francisco’s housing problems: ”The Google Bus protesters have said that the company should build housing on its campus, but the Mountain View city council has explicitly forbidden Google from doing just that. They’ve argued that it’s to protect the city’s burrowing owl population.”
- The Fleeting Brilliance Of The British New Wave - "The British New Wave lasted only a few years – say from about 1959 to 1963 and it consisted of little more than seven or eight films. Most of the them were adapted from books or plays written by young contemporary writers such as John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Shelagh Delaney. A slight relaxation of censorship by the late fifties together with the invention of lightweight portable cameras and faster film stock enabled directors such as Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson to start making films about gritty northern working-class life but also set the films on location away from London and the usual film studios. The British audiences found this as pretty revolutionary stuff and a cinematic breath of fresh air."
- The Economics of Fake Degrees - Scott McLemee on the diploma mills that issue qualifications to all comers, for a price: ”Ezell and Bear cite a congressional committee’s estimate from 1986 that there were more than 5,000 fake doctors practicing in the U.S. The figure must be several times that by now.”
- The Sad, Strange, True Story Of Sandy Allen, The Tallest Woman In The World - Sandra Allen examines the life of her namesake, who reached the height of 7 feet 7 inches: ”I saw in the New York Times that she had died and I read about the years she spent in a nursing home even though she was only 53. I read how rare gigantism is, and how it ensured poor health and physical pain on top of the constant ridicule and anguish. The deeper I dug, the more I realized how much more there was to consider than a coincidence of names…”
- Twilight of the Pizza Barons - A look at Tom Monaghan, 77-year-old founder of Domino’s Pizza, and Mike Ilitch, 84-year-old founder of Little Caesars: ”The man who invented 30-minute pizza delivery sold Domino’s and… spent most of his fortune creating a foundation, a university, a law school, a mutual fund, and a radio station that embrace his Roman Catholic beliefs… The founder of the privately held Little Caesars takeout pizza chain owns the Tigers, which he bought from Monaghan, the National Hockey League’s Detroit Red Wings, Detroit’s ornate Fox Theater, and tracts of vacant downtown land littered with rocks and broken glass… Domino’s and Little Caesars changed the way Americans eat pizza, helping to make it one of the country’s most popular foods. The pizza barons were great at selling pies. Now one wants to save Detroit, and the other wants to save everything else.”
- Tim O’Toole - Oli commutes on FirstCapital Connect. Whenever his train is delayed, he starts up Photoshop and edits the face of FirstCapital Connect’s CEO: ”The frustrating thing is that you’ve got me over a barrel, Tim. I have to use your trains and I have to pay whatever you decide to charge me. You’ve got me over a great big barrel. My trousers are round my ankles and you’re not being very gentle with me. I don’t like it, Tim and I’m asking you to stop… If you’re wondering how to get me to stop meddling with your face, then the answer is simple. Stop my trains from being delayed. I don’t know how. That’s your job. No delays. No new uploads.”
Happy invoicing!
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