Let's post this lot a bit earlier today so you can waste client time instead of your own:
Happy invoicing!
- Justice in Brooklyn. - "My bike got stolen last night and goddamn if I didn’t have it back before noon today, thanks to a curious but powerful mixture of internet savvy, a responsive police force, and one very special 'Law and Order' fan." It's amazing that, when Jami Attenberg reported her bicycle stolen and being advertised for sale on Craigslist, the NYPD were actually willing to send out a squad car within fifteen minutes, and then deploy a team of undercover officers to catch the bad guy. I can't imagine the Met doing that, somehow.
- Woman in technology - "Usually I avoid topics like women in technology because (1) it is a can of worms, and (2) I can really only speak for myself. For the most part, I’d rather be seen as a person in technology than a woman... As a woman who is often the only-woman-in-the-room, I want people to know it isn’t always easy." Nicole Sullivan, an engineer from Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team, makes a number of important points about perceptions of gender roles and unconscious bias in the technology industries.
- Pencil Tip Micro Sculptures By Dalton Ghetti - "Dalton Ghetti carefully crafts the tips of pencils into amazing micro sculptures. These miniature masterpieces are a side project for the professional carpenter, who has been perfecting this art for the last 25 years. Dalton uses a razor blade, sewing needle, a sculpting knife, a steady hand and lots of patience to meticulously carve the graphite which can take anywhere between a few months to a few years." These are just incredible
- The Tiger Oil Memos - "From the offices of the now-defunct but at one time Houston-based Tiger Oil Company come a total of 22 enormously entertaining memos; all sent by, or on behalf of, the firm's incredibly amusing, painfully tactless, and seemingly constantly angry CEO - Edward 'Tiger Mike' Davis - to his staff." A good taste of his character: "Do not speak to me when you see me. If I want to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don't want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you sons-of-bitches."
- Excerpt from the Case Study of The Space Shuttle Primary Control System - "One of the abort simulations they chose to test is called a 'Transatlantic abort,' which supposes that the crew can neither return to the launch site nor go into orbit. The objective is to land in Spain after dumping some fuel. The crew was about to go into this dump sequence when all four of our flight computer machines locked up and went 'catatonic'. Had this been the real thing, the Shuttle would probably have had difficulty landing. This kind of scenario could only occur under a very specific and unlikely combination of physical and aerodynamic conditions; but there it was: Our machines all stopped. Our greatest fear had materialized - a generic software problem." Classic example of how analysing an unprecedented failure in a real-time control system led to the discovery of a generic class of problem, with the result that 17 further bugs-waiting-to-happen could be identified and fixed.
- Spamtrap - "'Spamtrap' is an interactive installation piece that prints, shreds and blacklists spam email." So much for Oscar Wilde's assertion that "All art is quite useless."
- Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge - When Henry Kissinger entered the US Government in 1968, he received advice from Ellsberg: "First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess."
- Journalism Warning Labels - "It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there's no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content... I figured it was time to fix that, so I made some stickers. I've been putting them on copies of the free papers that I find on the London Underground. You might want to as well." Excellent range of stickers from Tom Scott. E.g.: "WARNING: Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about", "WARNING: Journalist hiding their own opinions by using phrases like 'some people claim'"" - we need some way of attaching these to posts in General
- The Hacker's Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition - "'Look,' I said to myself, 'you founded one of the five biggest software companies in the world, Autodesk. You wrote large pieces of AutoCAD, the world standard for computer aided design. You've made in excess of fifty million dollars without dropping dead, going crazy, or winding up in jail. You've succeeded at some pretty difficult things, and you can't control your flippin' weight?'" Despite John Walker's light-hearted tone, this is actually a serious book full of excellent advice.
- Accidental Penis - "Because penis is not always intentional." An extensive collection of images of things that probably weren't actually meant to look like penises, but turned out that way
Happy invoicing!
Comment