Good of them to declare a public holiday for the 400th opportunity to waste your time reading this stuff
Bonus Bank Holiday pudding linky: norrahe's blackberry and apple tart
Happy invoicing!
- Hell and High Water - "It is not if, but when Houston’s perfect storm will hit." This article from last year explains why the catastrophe currently striking Houston could have vast economic implications not just for the USA but for the whole world. (This is the text version; if you fancy giving your laptop’s fans a workout, you can try the cool multimeejah, bro version instead.)
- Papers I like (part 1), Papers I like (part 2), Papers I like (part 3) - Fabian Giesen shares links to his favourite Computer Science papers, with notes on each. ”This started out on Twitter and I expected having to write up maybe 50 or so, but then it made the rounds. I don’t think I have 1200+ papers that I’d recommend reading, and even if I did, I don’t think a reading list of that length is actually useful to anyone… The kind of paper I like most is those that combine solid theory with applications to concrete problems. You won’t find a lot of pure theory or pure engineering papers here. This is also emphatically not a list of “papers everyone should read” or any such nonsense. These are papers I happen to like, and if you share some of my interests, I think you’ll find a lot to like in them too.”
- Donald E. Westlake: The Writer’s Writer’s Writer - ”Harlan Ellison gave me a piece of good advice that I have never forgotten: ‘Throw out that ******* copy of Finnegans Wake you’re always carrying around and go read Donald E. Westlake. He’ll teach you everything you need to know about writing fiction.’” Scott Bradfield on the prolific American writer, whose work you almost certainly know from various films even if you’ve never read any of his books. I read a huge amount of Westlake borrowed from the local library in my mid-to-late teens, and this article inspired me to get on Amazon and buy a bunch of his books - some old favourites, some new to me.
- The mystery of a spooky Confederate submarine might finally be solved - "The first sub to sink an enemy ship was the Confederate H. L. Hunley, a hand-cranked contraption that struck the USS Housatonic off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1864. But the Hunley isn't just famous for its superlative spot in the history of naval warfare. It's also known for carrying a puzzling—and kind of creepy—mystery." The wreck of the submarine was discovered in 1995, and a new analysis of the remains of the crew suggests they were, quite literally, hoist by their own petard.
- The Next Chapter in a Viral Arms Race - Myxamatosis was released into the Australian rabbit population in an attempt to wipe them out, but evolved fairly rapidly into a less harmful form even as the rabbits evolved resistance. As happens with evolution, it’s turning nasty again: ”By exposing lab rabbits to these archived strains, the team showed that by the 1990s, the virus had gained a new ability: It could completely shut down a rabbit’s immune system… The wild rabbits started to resist the virus, the virus started to kill them in a new way, and neither side gained any ground.”
- MIT Press Classics Available Soon at Archive.org - "For more than eighty years, MIT Press has been publishing acclaimed titles in science, technology, art and architecture. Now, thanks to a new partnership between the Internet Archive and MIT Press, readers will be able to borrow these classics online for the first time." The collection is now starting to fill up, with books covering a wide range of topics
- Introducing 306 Million Freely Downloadable Pwned Passwords - Troy Hunt, whose free service Have I Been Pwned? will notify you if your email address appears in a password dump, has decided to make a full dump of pwned password hashes available, so users can be encouraged to avoid reusing them: ”NIST isn't mincing words here, in fact they're quite clearly saying that you shouldn't be allowing people to use a password that's been breached before, among other types of passwords they shouldn't be using… I realised I was in a unique position to help do something about the problem they're trying to address due to the volume of data I've obtained in running HIBP.”
- The reasons HMS Queen Elizabeth has two islands - "Many have wondered why HMS Queen Elizabeth has two ‘islands’. Here we consider why she is the first aircraft carrier in the world to adopt this unique arrangement and the benefits it brings." Apparently “they don’t need the space for planes, because there aren’t any” isn’t the right answer
- Inside the world of Silicon Valley's 'coasters' — the millionaire engineers who get paid gobs of money and barely work - It must be dreadful being rich: ”This person was making $1 million a year, mostly in stock, and running a team of about three dozen people… As tired as the engineer was, there was no way to just up and quit the job. There were taxes to pay, thanks to that stock and the incoming salary was needed to pay those taxes. But after getting violently ill, the engineer decided not to go in. Not that day. Not ever again. And the person knew that they wouldn't get fired.”
- Faces of Century - Jan Langer photographed centenarian Czechs in the same pose as a photograph of them in their youth: ”The majority of those I approached agree that with advancing age life is faster; until, at last, the life will pass in a moment. Time is shrinking, as are the faces of the elders. I wondered what changes and what remains on a human face and in a human mind in such a long time, and in such a short while in relative terms… This set of comparative photos (of archive portraits from the family album and contemporary portraits from the present time) explores the similarities and the differences in appearance and in physiognomy.”
Marie Burešová, *1910, Karolínov on Kroměřížsko.
On the left 23 years old (wedding), on the right 101 years old
Bonus Bank Holiday pudding linky: norrahe's blackberry and apple tart
Happy invoicing!
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