Looks like I have one week to change the counter from a byte to a word, or we’ll be back to Monday Links zero, and you can’t do zero in Roman numerals 
Happy invoicing!
- The Wolves of Paris - As if the Hundred Years War wasn’t enough of a pain: ”In winter of 1450, Paris was invaded. Not by an invading army. But by a pack of man-eating wolves."
- The Man Who Made the UK Say “I’m Sorry For What We Did To Turing.” - ”John Graham-Cumming used cunning and data to get the apology.” Good for him
- Falling - William McPherson was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; now he lives in poverty: ”Like a lot of other people, I started life comfortably middle-class, maybe upper-middle class; now, like a lot of other people walking the streets of America today, I am poor. To put it directly, I have no money. Does this embarrass me? Of course, it embarrasses me—and a lot of other things as well. It’s humiliating to be poor, to be dependent on the kindness of family and friends and government subsidies. But it sure is an education.”
- The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS - Excellent, long piece by Jody Rosen about the famous test that must be passed to become a London black cab driver: ”Actually, “challenge” isn’t quite the word for the trial a London cabby endures to gain his qualification. It has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine… Test-takers have been asked to name the whereabouts of flower stands, of laundromats, of commemorative plaques. One taxi driver told me that he was asked the location of a statue, just a foot tall, depicting two mice sharing a piece of cheese. It’s on the facade of a building in Philpot Lane, on the corner of Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge.”
- All Cameras Are Police Cameras - Also on the streets of London, James Bridle considers the walls, ancient and modern, erected by the powers that be: ”On the morning of Thursday, 30th October 2014, I set out to walk the perimeter of the London Congestion Charge Zone, a journey of some twelve miles around the centre of the city… The Congestion Charge Zone covers the area enclosed by the Third London Wall. This Wall continues the transformation, begun by the Second, from a physical into an electromagnetic entity. It is made of bits, electrons and radio waves, becoming less and less visible even as it becomes more pervasive.”
- Oh h1 - a simple yet addictive logic puzzle that runs in your browser. It’s a kind of binary Sudoku.
- Surviving An SR-71 Ejection And Living To Tell About It! - The title is slightly misleading, as test pilot Bill Weaver and his colleague Jim Zwayer didn’t eject from the Blackbird; they were forcibly ejected: ”Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion. I learned later the time from event onset to catastrophic departure from controlled flight was only 2-3 seconds. Still trying to communicate with Jim, I blacked out, succumbing to extremely high g-forces. Then the SR-71 literally disintegrated around us… Gradually regaining consciousness, I realized this was no dream; it had really happened. That also was disturbing, because I COULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED what had just happened.”
- Tetris Printer Algorithm - A ridiculously complex algorithm for using the Tetris playfield to create images: ”The algorithm converts pixels from a source image into squares in the Tetris playfield, one row at a time from the bottom up. To generate an individual square, the algorithm assembles a structure consisting of a rectangular region fully supported by a single square protruding from the bottom. When the rectangular region is completed, its rows are cleared, leaving behind the protruding square.”
- Stanford Libraries unearths the earliest US website - ”Some of the earliest pages from the World Wide Web have been restored and are once again browsable, providing a glimpse of how the web once operated. Stanford Libraries has made these pages available with Stanford Wayback… “I first saw a demonstration of the web at a conference in Southern France in 1991,” recalled Tony Johnson, a SLAC physicist and one of the lab's web pioneers. “I immediately thought that it would be a great way of sharing information on the Internet.” This meeting inspired physicist Paul Kunz to install the first web server outside of Europe at SLAC, with the first SLAC websites added between Dec. 6 and Dec. 12, 1991.“
- Rejected Princesses - ”Women too awful, awesome, or offbeat for kids’ movies.” For example, Ranavalona of Madagascar: ”The west called her The Female Caligula, but if half what they said is true, he was more a male Ranavalona. This famously cruel ruler of Madagascar ostensibly killed between 30-50% of the entire population during her reign via unspeakable means — yet simultaneously, she kept her country independent, repeatedly defeated the combined forces of the English and French, and instigated one of the first industrial revolutions seen outside of Europe. She, uh, also tried making a giant pair of scissors to chop invaders in half. Unequal parts conqueror, protector, and lunatic, she was, at the very least, not boring.”
Happy invoicing!
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