Today, I'm spending more time fiddling with the infinitely-adjustable chair ClientCorp provided when I complained of back pain than I am working 
Happy invoicing!
- The Data That Threatened to Break Physics - "What does a rational scientist do with an impossible result?" The full story of the kerfuffle surrounding the 2011 OPERA experiment that appeared to show neutrinos travelling from CERN in Switzerland to Italy’s Gran Sasso mountains at a speed faster than light.
- Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers - "I was quite surprised that camera work, a subject with more than 30 years of history in games, was hardly discussed. I decided to start a journey through the history of 2D gaming, documenting their challenges, approaches and how the evolution of their solutions." Itay Keren details the many options available to the game developer when creating a scrolling game, with numerous examples.
- 78 rpm records in the U.K. 1898-1926 - "The ambition of this site is to illustrate each and every ‘make’ of disc record marketed in the U.K. in the period stated. They are often referred to (loosely) as 78 rpm records, and we think that nearly 300 labels may have existed during this time period.” The British Homophone Company issued a series of small-diameter records under the label “Homo-Baby”
- A Ballsy Procedure - Rebecca Kreston on a weird but once widely used treatment for TB: ”As you can image, there were myriad long-term effects to filling one’s lungs up with ping pong balls and bits of wax. The literature is riddled with case studies of patients presenting with major airway obstruction, organ damage, pneumonia, abscesses, and even cases of malignancy caused by long-term irritation and inflammation of the plombe.”
- The Early History of Smalltalk - Alan Kay on the origins of the hugely influential programming language: ”Small minds try to form religions, the great ones just want better routes up the mountain. Where Newton said he saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants, computer scientists all too often stand on each other’s toes.”
- Barbican – Urban Poetry - "Here's a charming new short documentary about the Barbican estate, from film-maker Joe Gilbert. He uses the reminiscences of residents combined with beautifully shot black and white footage of the estate, taken from a number of strange and interesting angles.” I first saw this short film on Saturday, when it was shown at the fifth Boring Conference in London’s Conway Hall
- The Best Dystopian Novels Written Before Orwell’s 1984 - "Orwell’s classic novel didn’t arise in isolation, and there were a number of earlier dystopian novels written before Orwell put pen to paper (or finger to typewriter). Here is our pick of the ten best early dystopian novels worth checking out." We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is brilliant, FYI
- Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Cover - Jen Christiansen digs back further than the known origin of the design in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy, and eventually finds and interviews Harold D. Craft, Jr. who originally created the stacked plot of radio signals from a pulsar as a figure in his PhD thesis.
- The Discovery of Apache ZooKeeper’s Poison Packet - Evan Gilman: ”ZooKeeper, for those who are unaware, is a well-known open source project which enables highly reliable distributed coordination… after a lengthy investigation, we managed to uncover four different bugs coming together to conspire against us, resulting in random cluster-wide lockups. Two of those bugs laid in ZooKeeper, and the other two were lurking in the Linux kernel.”
- Lonely Chairs at CERN - "Best of lonely chairs in the largest laboratory of particle physics in the world!" Who knows, maybe TBL sat in one of these very chairs as he invented the World Wide Web
Happy invoicing!
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