Quite sunny here today. I assume they're saving the tempest for when I have to drive home 
Happy invoicing!
- My Own Life - Noted neurologist Oliver Sacks reflects on his recent diagnosis of terminal cancer: ”I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying… It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. ”
- The Apollo Saturn V LVDC Project - Fran Blanch has been getting hold of bits of Apollo project hardware and trying to work out exactly how they work. This page is her Launch Vehicle Digital Computer project: ”As a result of my X-ray analysis of my own LVDC board in February 2013, a viewer donated another LVDC page assembly board to me that had been exposed to the elements in a salvage yard for over 40 years. They sent this priceless artifact for the specific purpose that it be disassembled and destructively reverse engineered down to the component level, so that once and for all the real technology beneath the surface could be understood, that could explain how the Apollo Launch Vehicle Digital Computer really worked.”
- New Age Bulltulip Generator - "Namaste. Do you want to sell a New Age product and/or service? Tired of coming up with meaningless copy for your starry-eyed customers? Want to join the ranks of bestselling self-help authors? We can help." Had to use a URL shortener for this one, to get the URL past the naughty words filter
- Forgotten tech father: Bill Tutte vs. Alan Turing? - "Contrary to popular opinion, Alan Turing was not the only brilliant mathematical code-breaker at Bletchley Park during World War Two. He was also not the only one who was instrumental in the birth of computing.”
- The Mystery of the Creepiest Television Hack - The story of the famous 1987 incident when somebody hijacked the broadcast signals of Chicago stations WGN-TV and WTTW: ”The government was unamused. Officials from the FCC, the agency responsible for regulating America’s airwaves, pledged to track down the mysterious culprits and bring them to justice. Agents from the FBI's Chicago field office would soon join the investigation. "I would like to inform anybody involved in this kinda thing, that there's a maximum penalty of $100,000, one-year in jail, or both," Phil Bradford, an FCC spokesman, told a reporter the following day.”
- Josef Schulz documents abandoned checkpoint architecture across Europe - "In the past, national borders were divisive by character. In some cases their purpose was to delineate between political, legal, fiscal and monetary systems, in others between linguistic and cultural differences. Borders were lines, drawn not only across territories but also through our heads… The border posts resemble abandoned sentinels or faded monuments of past partition. ”
- Your Family: Past, Present, and Future - Tim Urban on the maths of genealogy: ”You can see that things get hectic pretty quickly when you start moving back generations. The top row is the 128-person group of your great5 grandparents, or your grandparents’ grandparents’ great-grandparents. The thing that I find surprising is how recently in time you had such a large number of ancestors… the early 19th-century world contained 128 random strangers going about their lives, each of whose genes makes up 1/128th of who you are today.”
- Offence and Free Speech - Frankie Boyle: ”I was asked to speak on a panel about offence and free speech post Charlie Hebdo. I always quite like the idea of speaking at some serious discussion, but in practice I just make everybody uncomfortable and they all smile at me uneasily in the way a posh cafe owner does when builders come in to buy rolls. And yet current attitudes in Britain to offence and free speech certainly mean that I've got a lot of ******* time on my hands, so I thought I'd take a break from building matchstick cathedrals and learning the harpsichord to share my thoughts.”
- Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot - Carl Zimmer explains the place of the null hypothesis in science: ”People often think that the job of scientists is to prove a hypothesis is true—the existence of electrons, for example, or the ability of a drug to cure cancer. But very often, scientists do the reverse: They set out to disprove a hypothesis.”
- Why girls shouldn't run away to London - "Thanks to my friend Chris for these scans from Kathleen Wood’s Escape to London, published in 1977 by the Edinburgh-based firm Holmes MacDougall. Chris recalls coming across this book during his schooldays in Stirling, and that it was part of a series warning children about the potential dangers of the wider world."
Happy invoicing!
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