In the bugfixing stage at ClientCo. Every one reminds me I should have been more assertive in demanding a test-driven approach in the first place 
Happy invoicing!
- Cape Adare - Maciej Cegłowski, who has previously appeared here talking about accidentally wandering into a top secret Chinese research establishment and the glories of Argentinian steaks, has now taken a trip to the Antarctic: ”When I get down to the floor, the metal chair rushes over to greet me. We have a brief and painful reunion before I can imprison it under the desk. Then I feel around in the darkness for shoes and a minimal amount of clothing… Putting on my pants means hopping on one foot while I get smashed against all four walls of the cabin in sequence. The brochure did not dwell on these aspects of Antarctic adventure travel. At least the painful smashing distracts me from the urge to vomit.”
- What did the Nazis know about the Manhattan Project? - "The primary motivation of much Manhattan Project secrecy was to keep the Germans from finding out that the United States and United Kingdom were feverishly working on developing nuclear weapons. So it seems a pretty sensible question to ask: Did it work? That is, did the secrecy keep the Germans from knowing about Allied progress on the bomb?" Alex Wellerstein examines the evidence of what the Nazis knew.
- The Power Jack 3500 Watt Inverter: Buyers beware!!! - "In late 2008 I needed to buy a high power true sine wave inverter, for an alternative energy scheme… The price seemed right, and Power Jack made a lot of advertising telling that their product was much better than the typical Chinese ones. I bought that, and I bought the inverter. And I got cheated real good. It has often been said that one gets what one pays for. Not so! I paid good, real, decent money for this inverter, and got a piece of crap, if you excuse the expression, which needed a complete re-engineering and reconstruction to become usable.” A cautionary tale, and an interesting explanation of utterly crap hardware and how to fix it.
- The mystery of the 'ghost trees' may be solved - The strange case of the albino redwoods: ”Albinos are exceedingly rare - there are only 406 in existence, by Moore's latest count. And redwoods as a species are notoriously complex. The trees' genomes have 32 billion base pairs to humans' 3.2 billion, and they carry six copies of each chromosome instead of two. No one has successfully sequenced the redwood genome, making it impossible to pinpoint the mutation that causes their albinism… Vast rings of related plants communicate via their roots, and during the hard months of winter and early spring, they'll distribute nutrients evenly among themselves. Scientists have spilled dye onto trees at one end of a grove and traced it through the root network all the way to the other side.”
- A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold - Alex Cavendish on deaths in British prisons: ”In this blog post I am going to discuss the issue of deaths in custody, especially cases where prisoners have taken their own lives and I apologise in advance if some readers find these subjects distressing. I know that I do. In the specific case that I deal with towards the end of this post I have been careful to withhold details that might lead to the identification of one particular young man – someone I knew personally – in order to protect his family. Details of this case are particularly graphic and involve a violent sexual assault, so please be warned before reading further.”
- Can we open the black box of AI? - Davide Castelvecchi on the odd situation that while deep learning systems such as neural networks can do amazing things, we don’t actually know how they work once they’ve been trained: ”Everything seemed to go well — until one day the Humvee approached a bridge and suddenly swerved to one side. He avoided a crash only by quickly grabbing the wheel and retaking control… Such networks are also as opaque as the brain. Instead of storing what they have learned in a neat block of digital memory, they diffuse the information in a way that is exceedingly difficult to decipher. Only after extensively testing his software's responses to various visual stimuli did Pomerleau discover the problem: the network had been using grassy roadsides as a guide to the direction of the road, so the appearance of the bridge confused it.”
- Code of Silence - "Two Chicago police officers uncovered a massive criminal enterprise within the department. Then they were hung out to dry."
- The oldest computer in use by the federal government has been found - "If you want to find the oldest computers in government, then you might as well just wait until government up and decides to find them all itself. So congratulations everybody, we found all of them! Well, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) did." Allan Lasser examines some of the oddities uncovered in the GAO report, including air conditioning systems controlled by Commodore Amigas.
- Ketchup Physics 101 - ”Ketchup is one of the world’s perfect foods. It’s salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami all at once. You can eat it on almost anything… Its one flaw? It can be tricky to get out of the bottle, especially if the bottle is glass. Why? Like with much of life, it all comes down to physics. We asked illustrator Lucas Adams to take a look at the history of the ketchup bottle, and the science contained within."
- Shopfront Elegy - Vici MacDonald photographs commercial premises frontages. This Bargain Booze in Liverpool has had two of its letters nicked, possibly by the AA:
Happy invoicing!
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