So bored today I'm reading an explanation of how Ruby's regular expression engine works. Wish I hadn't already read these 
Happy invoicing!
- What Is Code? - Brilliant, long explanation of what software is about, by Paul Ford aka Ftrain: ”We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, “Can you tell me what code is?”… Code has been my life, and it has been your life, too. It is time to understand how it all works.”
- The Attack on Truth - "To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research… we have reached a watershed moment, when the enterprise of basing our beliefs on fact rather than intuition is truly in peril.” Lee McIntyre on the perils of ignorance.
- Records inna Babylon: On the search for London’s reggae heritage one sleeve at a time - "Photographer Alex Bartsch has spent the last few years tracking down the locations behind some of reggae’s most iconic sleeves."
- Over the Edge 3D: Death in Grand Canyon - ”Over 770 deaths have occurred in Grand Canyon from the first river exploration by John Wesley Powell and his crew of 1869 to tourists falling off the rim today. This map by @kennethfield, explores the story of those deaths.” If you have a pair of Chromadepth goggles, you can see it in 3D
- Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child - Libby Hill looks back on the influence the comic strip had: ”I’d pore over Calvin And Hobbes time and again, finding renewed joy with every reread… What brought me back, even though I didn’t understand it at the time, was seeing a child—one who didn’t really fit in at school and who had a vague antipathy for almost everyone he met—struggle with the world he inhabited and find a way to make the best of it.”
- Columbus, greed, slavery, and genocide: what really happened to the American Indians - HT to Zeity for pointing me to this long piece explaining the real history of the American genocide: ”Christopher Columbus never set foot in the land that would become the United States of America. In fact, he never even saw it… What he had categorically not done was “discover” anything, as somewhere between 50 to 100 million people already lived there quite happily, just as they had done for tens of thousands of years. On the other hand, what he did was to start a brutal slave trade in American Indians, and usher in four centuries of genocide that culled them to virtual extinction.”
- The Wire: Tautology Supercut - "Every tautology in The Wire, in chronological order." It is what it is.
- Lisp as the Maxwell’s equations of software - "Alan Kay has famously described Lisp as the “Maxwell’s equations of software”. He describes the revelation he experienced when, as a graduate student, he was studying the LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual and realized that “the half page of code on the bottom of page 13… was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.”… What we’re going to do in this essay is understand what that half page of code means, and what it means that Lisp is the Maxwell’s equations of software. However, we won’t literally work through the half page of code above. Instead, we’ll do something much more informative: we’ll create a modern, fully executable equivalent of the code above. Furthermore, to make this essay accessible, I won’t assume that you know Lisp. Instead, I’ll teach you the basic elements of Lisp.”
- The Clint Eastwood Project - "The journey of a father and son who search for the meaning of manhood with fast food and every Clint Eastwood movie ever made. Even the really tulipty ones." Blog by Brad and Andrew Flory recounting their experiences watching all sixty films featuring Clint Eastwood: "Few people on the planet share our accomplishment (probably because they don't want to)… Sixteen months were devoted to this project, and it wasn't always easy and or pleasant.” Another HT to Zeity for this one
- В спальне бога - which Google Translate assures me means “In the bedroom of the God.” Russian urban explorer Ralph Mirebs photographs the long-abandoned building at Baikonur Cosmodrome housing the remains of the Soviet Space Shuttle project, Buran: ”Time and people did not spare the ships and their current state is very pitiable. Part of the thermal protection tiles fell off, cabin windows broken, wing and fuselage covers a generous layer of bird droppings accumulated on more than twenty years… From Space romance gone, leaving her only dry figures of financial statistics.” Translated version here for those of us whose Russian is a bit rusty.
Happy invoicing!
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