Free food for thought:
Happy invoicing!
- animating on eggshells - "A couple of weeks ago, Banksy posted his original storyboard for the Zombie Simpsons opening that ran back in October. It makes for interesting viewing, and most of the ideas contained therein made it into the finished product. There are a couple of minor touch ups, mostly sanitizing some of the gorier sketches Banksy did, but on the whole it is pretty faithful to the original concepts . . . with one telling exception."
- Palace Driven Development - Entertaining fable about large system development by szeryf, filled with relevant and amusing links. "They could go on for hours on how cost-efficient this was: they could use and fire the contractors at will, although they were much costlier than standard employees. The rich man could not help but notice that the contractors were the same people over and over again."
- Introduction to AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central and AN/FSQ-8 Combat Control Central - "The AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central and the AN/FSQ-8 Combat Control Central are large-scale electronic digital computers manufactured for the United States Air Force by International Business Machines Corporation. These computers are assigned vital roles in defending continental United States against hostile attack from the air. The purpose of this manual is to introduce the AN/FSQ-7 and AN/FSQ-8 data-processing systems by describing briefly what they are, what they do, and how they do it." IBM's manuals for the systems behind SAGE, the USA's Semi-Automatic Ground Environment air defence network.
- Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code - Geological statistician Mohan Srivastava discovered a flaw in a scratchcard game operated by the Ontario Lottery, but had to go to some lengths to convince them he wasn't a crank when he tried to report it: "The package was sent at 10 am. Two hours later, he received a call from Zufelt. Srivastava had correctly predicted 19 out of the 20 tickets. The next day, the tic-tac-toe game was pulled from stores."
- A day in my life with pain - "I swing each leg over the side of the bed and slowly apply my full weight. The right ankle might buckle under it, it might not. Balance is hard either way... 8:17 I wonder if I can raise my hands above my head in the shower to wash my hair without falling down this morning. Damn, last time I fell down in the shower, it really hurt. I continue to stress out about falling down for the rest of the shower."
- How to Make Trillions of Dollars - "Before I get into it, I must say that I don’t recommend that you do this... You can make millions by selling a great product to people who need it, but you make billions and trillions by conditioning an entire nation of people to react to every inconvenience, every whim, and every passing desire or fear by buying something." David Cain explains how the powers-that-be engineered the modern consumerist society.
- From the Archive: Historic NASA Photos - "NASA has partnered with The Commons on Flickr and the Internet Archive to make a collection of 180 historic photos available for public viewing. The photos are arranged into three sections – Building NASA, Launch/Takeoff and NASA Center Namesakes. We’ve compiled some of the photos below but head on over to the NASA Flickr stream for the whole collection. The photos are also available, along with thousands more, on the NASA Images website." This is what the Johnson Space Center looked like in 1978:
- Jeopardy, IBM, and Wolfram|Alpha - Stephen Wolfram compares and contrasts the modus operandi of his Wolfram|Alpha "knowledge engine", IBM's Jeopardy-playing Watson project, and traditional Internet search engines: "...in a sense Wolfram|Alpha fully understands every answer it gives. It’s not somehow serving up pieces of statistical matches to documents it was fed. It’s actually computing its answers, based on knowledge that it has. And most of the answers it computes are completely new: they’ve never been computed or written down before."
- How to Make Anything Signify Anything - "For much of his long and largely secret career, Colonel William F. Friedman kept a very special photograph under the glass plate that covered his desk. As desks go, this one saw some impressive action. By the time he retired from the National Security Agency in 1955, Friedman had served for more than thirty years as his government’s chief cryptographer, and—as leader of the team that broke the Japanese PURPLE code in World War II, co-inventor of the US Army’s best cipher machine, author of the papers that gave the field its mathematical foundations, and coiner of the very term cryptanalysis—he had arguably become the most important code-breaker in modern history." William H. Sherman describes Friedman's innovative applications of steganography, based on a technique devised by Sir Francis Bacon.
- Vladimir Putin Action Comics - The wacky adventures of everybody's favourite Prime Minister of Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus: "I have written down the Government's final offer for your ownership stake in the energy consortium. Well it's not really an offer. It's actually just a drawing of me choking you out while pleasuring myself."
Happy invoicing!
