Just about to have a curry with Mr & Mrs RC (who send their regards). While we're busy scoffing, you can be busy reading:
Happy invoicing!
- Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters - "A little over ten years ago, on March 9, 2001, 39-year-old Meiwes, a computer technician living in the German village of Wüstefeld, brought home, had sex with and killed 44-year-old Brandes, a Berlin man who lived about 250 miles away. Meiwes then ate 44 pounds of his flesh over a period of ten months. While that may sound like murder, there’s something else that should be mentioned: Brandes wanted it all to happen." I think I'll stick to the curry, if it's all the same to you.
- Radiation Dose Chart - "This is a chart of the ionising radiation dose a person can absorb from various sources." Xkcd creator Randall Munroe offers a handy chart to help put the (frankly trivial) leaks from the Japanese reactors in perspective.
- Oregon Trail: How three Minnesotans forged its path - "Don Rawitsch rolled out a four-foot-long piece of white butcher paper on the living room floor of his Crystal apartment. He glanced at an open map of the United States frontier from the 1800s. Then he traced a squiggly line from the right side of the paper to the left." The story of the creation of the most successful educational game of all time.
- James Tilley Matthews and the Air Loom - "The character who wears a tinfoil hat to deflect malign invisible rays has become a crude and parodic cliché of paranoia, and thus of madness itself... in 1810, the prototype for all these spectral-cum-mechanical devices, James Tilly Matthews’ Air Loom, was first presented to the public." A fascinating story of early industrial paranoia; just for the hell of it, artist Rod Dickinson has created the machine that Tilley believed was being used to persecute him.
- The Lost Art of Pickpocketing - "The venerable crime has all but disappeared in the United States. What happened, and should we miss it?" Apparently it's been replaced by mugging with knives and/or guns, so maybe it wasn't that bad after all.
- So you want to be a consultant...? - "Or: Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can work 16 hours/day for yourself?" Handy hints from Steve Friedl.
- Inside The Deal That Made Bill Gates $350,000,000 - "On the 25th anniversary of Microsoft's IPO, Fortune is featuring our 1986 cover story in which we followed around a young Bill Gates as he prepared to take his company public. Here's the story of the birth of a billionaire." Interesting story about Redmond's answer to AtW
- Online Poker’s Big Winner - A look at the people who make and lose millions playing online poker. Warning: the NYT's ridiculous and arcane paywall rules may, or may not, interfere with your viewing of this story, depending on how many other things you've looked at on their site this month
- The Stolen Scream (YouTube video) - Noam Galai's photo of himself screaming was copied and has since appeared in thousands of different contexts; he describes the story in this Fstoppers' interview.
- 3eanuts - "Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters' expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all." Bleak...
Happy invoicing!
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