Is it Monday again already? You'll be wanting this lot then:
Happy invoicing!
- A Very Weird and Blocky Future - "In 1979, my father brought home a beige-colored box made of industrial plastic. There were a few metal toggles and dials on the face, and a tangle of black electrical cords hanging from it, attached to a pair of smaller plastic boxes outfitted with small, sliding dimmer switches. It looked like something hospitals use to test blood glucose levels, or jump-start a patient’s heart. But, instead of squirting conductive jelly on its two electric paddles, my father hooked the device up to our 13-inch black-and-white television set, gathered up his children, and said, 'Here is your new toy.'" Todd Levin reminisces in the first of a series of articles about the various games consoles he has owned over the years; here's the rest of them.
- Handwritten Typographers - "Hit pause for a moment and consider how greatly we – people in the digital age – are indebted to typographers. Almost all of our visual communication is delivered using the products of their craft: newspapers, SMSes, instant messages, emails, web pages, signs, posters, billboards; the list of purposes is endless... Lately, I've been asking just one question, though. Something which has always intrigued me: these people that help us communicate ... how do they themselves communicate? If we strip away the monitors, and the printing presses, and the typefaces ... how would William Caslon have written on a post-it note? So, to satisfy my own curiosity I asked a number of prominent typographers to send me a scan of their handwriting." Interesting results came from the idle curiosity of Cameron Adams.
- Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman - "I spend 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser scanner. I don't feel good about it." Michael Savitz makes his living buying second-hand books and reselling them on Amazon. Plan B, anyone?
- A Natural History of the @ Sign - "Although the change from at meaning "for a given amount per" to at meaning "in a specified (electronic) location" comes fairly naturally to English speakers, it does not for native speakers of other languages, for whom neither "at" nor @ meant anything until e-mail came around... As a result, while in some languages @ is simply called "at," in others, a wide variety of interesting nicknames have been developed for this little symbol. Most are based on the shape of the character, others are more abstract." I have to include this if only for mentioning that in the Forth programming language, @ means "fetch"
- Peruvian Gothic - "Don Benigno Aazco carved his way 36 years deep into the green heart of the Andean forest, founded 14 settlements, abandoned his wife and many children, married his daughter, slew his son-in-law, fought drug peddlers, tamed the wilderness, and reclaimed, as best he could, the Inca Empire. And now I was going to find him." Kate Wheeler's account of her remarkable expedition into the forests of the Andes, originally published in 1996.
- The International Dialects of English Archive - "IDEA was created in 1997 as a free, online archive of primary source dialect and accent recordings for the performing arts. Its founder and director is Paul Meier, author of the best-selling Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen, a leading dialect coach for theatre and film, and a specialist in accent reduction." Free MP3 files of people talking English in many different ways.
- Chasing Pirates: Inside Microsoft’s War Room - "AS the sun rose over the mountains circling Los Reyes, a town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, one morning in March 2009, a caravan of more than 300 heavily armed law enforcement agents set out on a raid. All but the lead vehicle turned off their headlights to evade lookouts, called “falcons,” who work for La Familia Michoacana, the brutal Mexican cartel that controls the drug trade. This time, the police weren’t hunting for a secret stash of drugs, guns or money. Instead, they looked to crack down on La Familia’s growing counterfeit software ring." Nice to see the Mexican authorities ensuring the continued prosperity of Microsoft's shareholders.
- The Underground City on Governors Island - "Today, I finally got on the ferry and went out to Governors Island. For you non-New Yorkers, Governors Island is an island located just south of Manhattan and was once used as a military base. An entire complex of buildings, including forts, churches, and army barracks, still remains in excellent condition on the island. Off limits for years, the island has recently been opened up to the public, with free ferries from Manhattan and Brooklyn... Though there’s a lot to write about, I wanted to focus on something that was simply too amazing to believe: an archaeological dig currently in the process of unearthing an entire town buried beneath Governors Island." A remarkable story with some great photographs. (If you're feeling sceptical about it by the end of the piece, you'll also want to read A Quick Note on Buried Cities.)
- How to Cheat Good - "...try not to plagiarize the teacher. You will be less likely to suffer her ire, since it will amuse her and her colleagues to no end, but you are more likely to be caught. Steal her ideas and rephrase them in your own prose, because there is nothing teachers like more than knowing that students can write well but have no original ideas." An entertaining piece from American academic Alex Halavais; it's worth reading the comments too.
- 9 Eyes - There are a number of collections of images from Google StreetView out there, but Jon Rafman's is the best: large images primarily selected for their value as images, and no text to distract from them. I like the seagull ones, and the strange little house sandwiched between two rock outcrops is just weird
Happy invoicing!
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