Actually busy at ClientCorp 
Read this lot for me and leave an executive summary over there somewhere.
Happy invoicing!
Read this lot for me and leave an executive summary over there somewhere.- The Mercenary - "In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Roy was a member of Third Force Reconnaissance Company in Vietnam, an elite precursor of the Marine Special Forces… Sometimes his mix of boyish enthusiasm, marine training, and American can-do attitude got him work in the mercenary minor leagues: a body-guarding gig here, an insurance investigation there. For decades, he’d strung together a living.” Just the man to investigate a $3 million robbery at a Peruvian gold mine.
- Death is All Around Us: The Plague Pits of London - ”‘Death is all around us’ is not just a turn of phrase. It’s an actual fact, at least for those living in London. When the bubonic plague swept through the city in 1665, over 100,000 people perished. Those more poetically inclined might say these people ‘disappeared’ off the face of this Earth, as if by magic. But the truth of the matter is that they didn’t disappear.” As Chirurgeon’s Apprentice Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris explains, you might even be eating your lunchtime sandwich sat on top of them
- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C - Damien Katz on why he keeps coming back to the venerable programming language: ”For years I've tried my damnedest to get away from C. Too simple, too many details to manage, too old and crufty, too low level… Other languages can get you to a working state faster, but in the long run, when performance and reliability are important, C will save you time and headaches. I'm painfully learning that lesson once again.”
- Sad Thanksgiving: I ate 5 frozen turkey dinners, which are gross miracles of*science - Alexis C. Madrigal samples the Thanksgiving dinner options for single people with no taste: ”When I see a frozen TV dinner filled with turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, bread stuffing, vegetables, and cranberry sauce, I stand in awe at how many strands of science and technology have come together… These are my tasting notes for five different frozen turkey dinners I found at Walmart, with special attention to how the actual dinners stack up with the serving suggestions on their boxes.”
- Solving the Mystery of Link Imbalance: A Metastable Failure State at Scale - Interesting article by Nathan Bronson of Facebook on tracking down and fixing problems that only occur at massive scale: ”For two years, we tackled this problem at the switch level. We worked with our vendors to detect imbalance and rapidly rotate the hash function’s seed when it occurred. This kept the problem manageable. As our systems grew, however, this auto-remediation system stopped working as well. Often, when we would drain an imbalanced link the problem would just move to another one. It was clear that we needed to understand the root cause.”
- Another Day, Another Pound - "In 1988, Harold Snoad, producer and director of the third and fourth series of Ever Decreasing Circles, wrote a book for BBC Television Training called Directing Situation Comedy… At the time, Snoad was working on the fourth series of Ever Decreasing Circles, and the book contains a handful of on-set and on-location pictures.” An inside look at how sitcoms were (and probably still are) put together.
- Why People Keep Trying to Erase the Hollywood Sign From Google Maps - "The Hollywood Sign might be one of the most recognizable things on Earth. In Los Angeles, it's also one of the most visible. You can see it from a plane as you glide into LAX. You can see it from a car as you drive up the 101 freeway. But a group of people who live near the sign are trying to hide it, even as it looms in the hills, in plain sight. By removing it from Google Maps."
- Barbarians at the Gateways: High-frequency Trading and Exchange Technology - Former trader Jacob Loveless on the technology underpinning HFT operations: ”Imagine every day you have to figure out a small part of the world. You develop fantastic machines, which can measure everything, and you deploy them to track an object falling. You analyze a million occurrences of this falling event, and along with some of the greatest minds you know, you discover gravity… You test it with your colleagues and say, 'I will drop this apple from my hand, and it will hit the ground in 3.2 seconds,' and it does. Then two weeks later, you go to a large conference. You drop the apple in front of the crowd...and it floats up and flies out the window. Gravity is no longer true; it was, but it isn't now. That's HFT. As soon as you discover it, you have only a few weeks to capitalize on it; then you have to start all over.”
- Why Americans Have Been Duped over the Use of the Atomic Bomb - Historian Paul Ham argues that the supposed reason for the use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is actually a post-facto rationalisation: ”In an article bearing the name of Henry Stimson, the then octogenarian former War Secretary, and written by Truman fixers, the American government invented the notion that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ‘our least abhorrent choice’, avoided a land invasion of Japan and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives… The article’s case for the use of the weapon was profoundly flawed. Most erroneously it argued that a land invasion of Japan and the atomic weapons were mutually exclusive – a case of either-or. This nexus was made up after the war. In 1945, it was never a case of “either the bomb or the invasion.” The question did not arise.”
- Museum of Selfies - Olivia Muus: ”This is a project that started when my friend aka. right hand and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning."
Happy invoicing!
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