Getting a bit chilly here. I'm beginning to suspect summer might be over 
Happy invoicing!
- How a $2.7 billion air-defense system became a 'zombie' program - "Unknown to most Americans, the Pentagon has spent $2.7 billion developing a system of giant radar-equipped blimps to provide an early warning if the country were ever attacked with cruise missiles, drones or other low-flying weapons… Yet 61-year-old Douglas Hughes flew undetected through 30 miles of highly restricted airspace before landing on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol.” Even the military have tried to have the programme shut down; but lobbyists for Raytheon prevailed.
- The Surprising Genealogy of Your Brain - "People talk about an individual’s genome as if it was a single consistent entity—but it isn’t… Our 37 trillion or so cells all arose from a single fertilized egg, and as this progenitor divided again and again, its daughters picked up mutations in their DNA that distinguished them, and their descendants, from their neighbors." Mapping these sub-genomes reveals that individual neurons in your brain can be more closely related to cells in your heart than to the neurons immediately adjacent.
- Think the floppy disk is dead? Think again! Here’s why it still stands between us and a nuclear apocalypse - "Tom Persky is the owner and operator of FloppyDisks.com… ‘In the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of industrial machines were built around floppy disks, which were high-tech of the time,’ he tells me. ‘They were built to last fifty years.’” The USA’s nuclear missile silos still use 8” floppies
- Smash cut to main titles - ”It’s really television that brought us the title sequence… Part of the appeal is the memory: a sequence will run at the start of so many weeks that they get burned into us. It’s probably impossible, then to coldly and objectively analyse a sequence but bollocks to cold and objective. The best title sequences deserve more than cold objectivity, they earn more.” Writer William Gallagher on the bit at the start, with a number of good examples.
- The truth about red wine's health benefits - "Health journalism is often filled with conflicting and confusing claims. And there may be no better example of this befuddlement than in the reporting around red wine. One day, a story emerges saying red wine is good for you. The next day, it's bad. The next day, it's good again." Julia Belluz goes through the actual studies on the health benefits of booze, so you don’t have to
- Scars Of War - "Taking advantage of yesterday’s bright October sunshine, I set out for a walk across London with my camera to see what shrapnel and bomb damage I could find still visible from the last century." Interestingly, much of this is actually from bombing raids in World War I, including damage to the plinth of Cleopatra’s Needle from the first aeroplane (as opposed to Zeppelin) raid on London in September 1917.
- The Best Little Porno Movie on the Internet [Very NSFW] - "The other night, my friend Fivestar said, “Hey, I’m going to be directing a Star Trek gang bang movie, you want to visit the set?” Just in case you are wondering, the answer to that question should always be yes. Warning: This article is very NSFW. Seriously. There are genitals. You have been warned." Annalee Newitz spends a day on the set of Star Trek: The Next Penetration.
- How a Fake Typhus Epidemic Saved a Polish City From the Nazis - "After typhus wreaked havoc in the trenches during World War I, the Nazis were terrified of possible outbreaks among their soldiers. German authorities in Poland required doctors to report all suspected and confirmed cases of typhus to them and send blood samples to German-controlled labs for testing. Poles with the disease were quarantined and spared detention in the labor camps, but infected Jews were executed." By figuring out a technique for spoofing the blood tests to return false positives, Dr Eugene Lazowski convinced the Germans there was an epidemic in the town of Rozwadów, causing them to keep their distance and saving the lives of thousands.
- Grunge Lip Sync - ”One of the “Must Haves” for Aye, Robot from the very beginning is getting actors in to do the voices. The story isn’t going to be told with cut scenes or text boxes or anything like that. The characters are going to talk… it’s a massive horror show trying to deal with the audio assets, paying money for and casting and dealing with actors and then there’s a tricky issue of lip sync.” Indie game developer Charlotte Gore devises a cunning hack to get lip syncing working just well enough to be convincing. (From my days as a game dev, I can confirm that a lot of apparent realism in games depends on this kind of clever hack that fools the eye into thinking something much more complex is going on.)
- Friends build 11 km scale model of the Solar System in Nevada desert - "The work of film-making pals, Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, To Scale: The Solar System is a mind-boggling labour of love, and one which is pretty much guaranteed to give you an all-new perspective on just how big the Solar System really is… Pointing out how traditional visual depictions of the Solar System get the sense of scale totally wrong, Overstreet and Gorosh are determined to set the record straight, making their own scale model of what the Solar System actually looks like in the middle of a dry lakebed in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert."
Bonus video, courtesy of quackhandle who sent me the link in February and probably thought I wasn't going to use it by now: follow the journey of a single photon travelling at the speed of light out from the sun to just past the orbit of Jupiter; but be warned, it takes forty-five minutes to get there
Happy invoicing!
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