Just because it's Easter doesn't mean the Internet downs tools; herewith, another selection of stuff:
Happy invoicing!
- The Sistine Chapel - token Easter-related link This Flash-based application offers an amazingly detailed view of the Sistine Chapel that allows you to pan around and zoom in on Michelangelo's glorious art. (Warning: it has choral music which can't, it seems, be turned off, and all that imagery will take ages to load on a slow connection.)
- A Rape in Cyberspace - "...there was cruelty enough lurking in the appearance Mr. Bungle presented to the virtual world -- he was at the time a fat, oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore the quaint inscription 'KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH!'" Julian Dibell's Village Voice article from 1993 concerning a series of assaults in LambdaMOO is one of the most-cited articles in the study of the nature of online identity.
- It's Creek Time at the Old Grinkle Iron Mine! - Phill Davison is into industrial archeology; this brilliant collection of photographs comes from two forays into an underground tramway and culvert at an old Yorkshire mine. "Sorting my pictures out in the warmth and safety of my home, it's really quite worrying to see how feeble the whole structure actually was down there."
- The Ladybird Book of The Policeman - Excellent spoof of a Ladybird "easy reading" book."Here we see a criminal about to throw a spanner... The brave policemen chase him and hit him until there is blood and hair and bits of bone all over their boots. The blood makes their boot caps shine like red cherries."
- Artificial Glaciers 101 - "The 'art of glacier growing,' as New Scientist calls it, is 'also known as glacial grafting.' It has been 'practiced for centuries in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and Karakorum ranges'..." I didn't know people made glaciers until I found this on BldgBlog
- Costco - Jonah Lehrer explores the neuroscience of shopping. "Retail stores manipulate this cortical setup. They are designed to open our wallets: the frivolous details of the shopping experience are really subtle acts of psychological manipulation. The store is tweaking our brain, trying to soothe the insula and stoke the nucleus accumbens."
- flickr set: Teabonics - "These are signs seen primarily at Tea Party Protests. They all feature 'creative' spelling or grammar. This new dialect of the English language shall be known as 'Teabonics.'" It's astonishing how few right-wing Americans can spell "socialism".
- How I'd Hack Your Weak Passwords - The usual advice, but John Pozadzides' 2007 article contains some useful data. "Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters... Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries."
- We Bought A Toxic Asset; You Can Watch It Die - NPR's Planet Money team have bought a share in a bundle of mortgages so they can track its decline. "Finally, we find a beautiful, totally toxic asset at what Solberg thinks is a good price: $36,000. Back in the bubble, somebody paid $2.7 million for this thing."
- The Dark Side of the Rainbow - Some people believe that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was designed to synchronise with the action in The Wizard of Oz. This is Stegokitty's definitive list of the points at which the two works synchronise, presumably only if you're stoned enough. FWIW, Pink Floyd have always insisted that this is rubbish; drummer Nick Mason told MTV, "It's absolute nonsense, it has nothing to do with The Wizard Of Oz. It was all based on The Sound Of Music."
Happy invoicing!
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