Now you've had your lunch, checking out this little lot should help promote digestion and prevent unpleasant bloatedness:
Happy invoicing!
- Badass of the Week: Hideaki Akaiwa - "Hideaki maintained his composure and navigated his way through the submerged city, finally tracking down his old house. He quickly swam through to find his totally-freaked-out wife, alone and stranded on the upper level of their house, barely keeping her head above water. He grabbed her tight, and presumably sharing his rebreather with her, dragged her out of the wreckage to safety. She survived. But Hideaki Akaiwa still wasn't done yet. Now, I'm sure you're wondering what the **** is more intense than commandeering a wet suit, face-punching a tsunami and dragging your wife of two decades out of the flooded wreckage of your home, but, no tulip, it gets even better. You see, Hideaki's mother also lived in Ishinomaki, and she was still unaccounted for. I think you all know where this is going." An astonishing story of one man's actions in the aftermath of the recent disasters in Japan. (I could have linked to Time's slightly more sedate account, but the Badass of the Week version is the one that really does him justice.)
- Fundamentalists Say The Darndest Things! - An extensive archive of some of the more extreme sayings of fundamentalists of all hues, gathered from various places on the web over the years. They're not all religious nutjobs, but they all hold very strong views about something: "My point is that the vast majority of cripples use their crippled status to gain an advantage over everyone else. That is why I distrust cripples in general. It isn't that a cripple couldn't earn my trust; it would just be more difficult for him than an able bodied individual."
- Internet Pioneers - "This web site profiles ten individuals whose work has contributed significantly to the development of the Internet." I'm linking to this as a tribute to one of those individuals, Paul Baran, who died on Saturday. Bonus link: an excellent interview with him from Wired.
- Bookshelf Porn - "Porn for book lovers. A photo blog collection of all the best bookshelf photos from around the world for people who *heart* bookshelves."
- no good deed goes unpunished - Jamie Zawinski on Internet asshattery. "I should come to expect this kind of behavior from the poorly-socialized nerds who populate the software world; after all, they were a significant part of what sucked about my previous career. But I'm not used to it. It still sucks." The general pissed-offness continues in the comments.
- How to Draw a Five-Dimensional Cube - "This paper introduces a method I developed for representing objects in more than three dimensions. With a little practice you can learn to visualize objects like 5D spheres, 4D cubes, and so on, and even see what happens when you rotate them in different ways." You know you want to
- Google's Python Class - the online course, including video lectures, that Google uses to train its own staff in the basics of programming in Python.
- White Whine - "A collection of first-world problems." One is forced to wonder how these people manage to face the world each day, given that it can never possibly satisfy their sense of entitlement. "Why is my lacrosse not in HD!?"
- Black and WTF - Excellent collection of very weird old black-and-white photographs.
- Le Flâneur - Video of well-known spots in Paris by Luke Shepard, constructed as a stop-frame animation sequence from still photographs:
Happy invoicing!
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