I get to WFH today; but only because I've got to go to the dentist 
Happy invoicing!
- The Bot Bubble - Doug Bock Clark on the click farms that are devaluing “social media engagement”: ”Eight workers sit in two rows, their tools arranged on their desks: a computer, a minaret of cell phone SIM cards, and an old cell phone. Tens of thousands of additional SIM cards are taped into bricks and stored under chairs, on top of computers, and in old instant noodle boxes around the room… Just as fast as Silicon Valley conjures something valuable from digital ephemera, click farms seek ways to create counterfeits.”
- Historian Uses Lasers to Unlock Mysteries of Gothic Cathedrals - "A former composer, would-be monk, and self-described gearhead—or, as he puts it, "tacklehead"— [Andrew] Tallon… is teasing out clues hidden in the ancient stones of Notre Dame and other medieval structures—and revolutionizing our understanding of how these spectacular buildings were made."
- We Let IBM's Robot Chef Tell Us What to Cook for a Week - "If you’ve been following IBM’s Watson project and like food, you may have noticed growing excitement among chefs, gourmands and molecular gastronomists about one aspect of its development… Chef Watson — developed alongside Bon Appetit magazine and several of the world’s finest flavor-profilers — has been launched in beta, enabling you to mash recipes according to ingredients of your own choosing and receive taste-matching advice which, reportedly, can’t fail.” It came out of beta last week, so you too can get an AI to recommend meals that sound, but may not actually be, appalling
- Milky Way Photography - Practical tips on photographing the heavens from Casper Smit: ”Here is how I do wide field single exposures, and also multiple stacked single images to create star trails.”
- CuttlePhish: Phishing as a Service - Find out which of your users are dumb by sending them phishing emails from a variety of well-known sites: ”Make sure you have permission to conduct a penetration test at your company… All of the links in the practice emails we send out will redirect to this safe page instead of to an attacker's website. We'll record who clicked on the links and email you a report.” What could possibly go wrong?
- The Lonely End - "Three months ago in an apartment on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan, Haruki Watanabe died alone. For weeks his body slowly decomposed, slouched in its own fluids and surrounded by fetid, fortnight-old food. He died of self-neglect, solitude, and a suspected heart problem. At 60, Watanabe, wasn’t old, nor was he especially poor. He had no friends, no job, no wife, and no concerned children. His son hadn’t spoken to him in years, nor did he want to again." Matthew Bremner meets the people who clean up after Japan’s neglected dead.
- Uber, but for Topological Spaces - "So it’s cold and rainy, and you’re up a little too late trying to figure out why that one pesky assumption is necessary in a theorem. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just order up a space that was path connected but not locally connected? You’re in luck, there’s
an appa website for that." Evelyn Lamb on π-Base, an online database of topological counterexamples.
- The Dozy Gene - Tom Cox on a family trait: ” Nobody can remember the exact moment my granddad’s scatterbrain gene kicked in, but a poll of those who knew him puts it at around the age of 36: four years younger than I am now, and four years before Ted set fire to a stranger’s coat by putting his still-lit pipe in his pocket during a coach trip from Ilkeston to Mablethorpe… recently, particularly as my hair on my head has become less thick and the hair on my face thicker, I’ve started to see a hint of Ted in the mirror.”
- What really happened on Mars? - "The Mars Pathfinder mission was widely proclaimed as "flawless" in the early days after its July 4th, 1997 landing on the Martian surface… But a few days into the mission, not long after Pathfinder started gathering meteorological data, the spacecraft began experiencing system resets." Michael B. Jones here collates various pieces of information about the problem, including a detailed email explaining how it was identified and resolved from Glenn Reeves of JPL, who led the software team.
- The Photographer Who is Getting Inside Abandoned Rural America - Andy Wright interviews Kelly Micheau: ”Sometimes I know of an exact building that I have seen previously documented and I will spend hours, days—or, in one case, two years—trying to find it for myself… But If I don’t have a specific structure in mind, I usually find them by good old-fashioned wandering. I avoid highways like the plague and I almost always refuse to take the same way home.”
Happy invoicing!
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