Nearly four months to go before I can be posting these from the bench, as nature intended. Ho hum 
Happy invoicing!
- Ethics of a Nazi judge - "Georg Konrad Morgen was the first man to prosecute commandants of the Nazi concentration camps, but he wasn’t an officer of war-crimes tribunals. He was himself a German SS officer, and he prosecuted his fellow SS officers in SS courts during the Second World War. Morgen charged them not with crimes against humanity but with ordinary crimes of corruption and murder. While investigating those crimes, he came upon the machinery of mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau and, recoiling in horror, he asked himself what he could do about it." Herlinde Pauer-Studer and J David Velleman explain how Morgen sought to bring justice while working within the system of the Nazi state.
- How to receive a million packets per second - "Last week during a casual conversation I overheard a colleague saying: "The Linux network stack is slow! You can't expect it to do more than 50 thousand packets per second per core!" That got me thinking. While I agree that 50kpps per core is probably the limit for any practical application, what is the Linux networking stack capable of?" Marek Majkowski, of CloudFlare, experiments.
- The Wetsuitman - "Last winter two bodies were found in Norway and the Netherlands. They were wearing identical wetsuits. The police in three countries were involved in the case, but never managed to identify them. This is the story of who they were."
- Suddenly, a leopard print sofa appears - "There's a leopard, recognized with substantial confidence, and then two much less probable choices are jaguar and cheetah… for a machine learning algorithm, this looks very impressive to me.” But when Artem Khurshudov probes a little deeper, it seems current work on machine intelligence may not have advanced as far as it first seems.
- Move over, Turing - "Let Rorschach have a turn." In similar vein, Fernanda & Martin from Google’s visualisation research group see what happens when visual AIs are fed inkblots.
- Building a primitive wattle and daub hut from scratch - "I built this hut in the bush using naturally occurring materials and primitive tools. The hut is 2m wide and 2m long, the side walls are 1m high and the ridge line (highest point) is 2m high giving a roof angle of 45 degrees. A bed was built inside and it takes up a little less than half the hut. The tools used were a stone hand axe to chop wood, fire sticks to make fire, a digging stick for digging and clay pots to carry water. The materials used in the hut were wood for the frame, vine and lawyer cane for lashings and mud for daubing. Broad leaves were initially used as thatch which worked well for about four months before starting to rot. The roof was then covered with sheets of paper bark which proved to be a better roofing material. An external fireplace and chimney were also built to reduce smoke inside."
- Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia - "When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon's founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west."
- This journalist didn’t just interview North Korean defectors, he followed them on their escape - Anna Fifield interviews Lee Hark-joon: "He takes incredible risks to tell these stories; the book at times reads like a thriller as Lee makes a perilous, 12,000-mile journey through China, across into Laos and then Thailand. He escapes – most of the time – from Chinese police chasing him along the border with North Korea, from North Koreans running a lumber camp in Siberia. He avoids Laotian police as he illegally crosses into the country with a group of North Korean defectors. Then there are the drug-addled local contacts, the equipment malfunctions, the boredom of waiting – sometimes for weeks – for someone to show up."
- Personal Renewal - John W. Gardner, who as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson oversaw the launch of Medicare, on self-renewal: ”We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations… Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if that's true I know some very busy middle level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.”
- Mythological Deaths In Art That May Have Been Slightly Exaggerated - Mallory Ortberg casts a sceptical eye over some supposedly serious injuries: ”Here we see Hyacinth dying yet again, this time from having his hand held.”
Happy invoicing!
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