Just got to get through this week… 
Happy invoicing!
- Air Traffic Control - reckon you can do better than the UK’s Nats managed last Friday? Have a go with this Air Traffic Control simulator running in your browser. ”It’s not easy…”
- How Google "Translates" Pictures into Words Using Vector Space Mathematics - ”In recent years, Google has worked out how to use its massive search database to translate text in an entirely different way… Now Oriol Vinyals and pals at Google are using a similar approach to translate images into words.” This is a good overview; read their paper at [1411.4555] Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator
- What colour is it? - A very simple idea: convert the time into an RGB colour, for an ever-changing clock
- Being, Fast and Slow - Peter Godfrey Smith on a video by marine biologist Daniel Stoupin, showing marine animals that move incredibly slowly, compared to human perceptions: ”Different kinds of living activity tend to be found at different temporal scales. This is not true of all forms of living activity – a kind of “breathing” is visible both at slow-life scales and at faster scales. As Stoupin says on his site, some bacteria living in the deep sea floors divide at a rate measured in centuries and millennia, rather than the rate of minutes seen in the bacteria around us now… To what extent is slow life different in form from fast life?”
- Playing With My Son: An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting - Andy Baio on experimenting on his son: ”What happens when a 21st-century kid plays through video game history in chronological order? Start with the arcade classics and Atari 2600, from Asteroids to Zaxxon. After a year, move on to the 8-bit era with the NES and Sega classics. The next year, the SNES, Game Boy, and classic PC adventure games. Then the PlayStation and N64, Xbox and GBA, and so on until we’re caught up with the modern era of gaming.” (N.B. the screenshot at the top of this piece shows an Atari 2600 console plugged in to a TV - but the image displayed on the TV screen is of the Atari 800 version of PacMan.)
- The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare - ”She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn't take it anymore… Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.” And what a surprise: the US government appears to be trying to bury the case against the bank
- How The Strand Bookstore Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon - Profile of a family business in New York that is somehow managing to survive in the age of Amazon: ”The main floor is bustling, and the store now employs merchandising experts to refine its traffic flow and make sure that prime display space goes to stuff that’s selling. Whereas you can leave a Barnes & Noble feeling numbed, particularly if a clerk directs you to Gardening when you ask for Leaves of Grass, the Strand is simply a warmer place for readers.”
- From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy - Mathias Meyer on how Travis CI found that their untracked, unlimited holiday time policy was actually having a deleterious effect on their staff: ”When people are uncertain about how many days it's okay to take off, you'll see curious things happen. People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don't want to seem like that person who's taking the most vacation days. It's a race to the bottom instead of a race towards a well rested and happy team.”
- Operation Socialist: How GCHQ Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco - "It was in the summer of 2012 that the anomalies were initially detected by employees at Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, Belgacom. But it wasn’t until a year later, in June 2013, that the company’s security experts were able to figure out what was going on. The computer systems of Belgacom had been infected with a highly sophisticated malware, and it was disguising itself as legitimate Microsoft software while quietly stealing data." Your tax money at work, folks! Well, those of you who pay any
- The Posters that Warned against the Horrors of a World with Women’s Rights - "Fashionably-dressed women are shown smoking cigars and ignoring children, drinking, gambling using stock tickers and generally hanging out like barflies… The message was that women’s rights were dangerous and letting women think for themselves could only end in a nightmarish society.” Indeed:
Happy invoicing!
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