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Monday Links from Somebody Else, Honest Vol. LXXII

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    Monday Links from Somebody Else, Honest Vol. LXXII

    Well, one of them is - I'd seen it via @twitter last week but for some reason it hadn't been added to the collection:
    • An Unexpected Time-Lapse Memory - A NYC photographer idly decides to take a time-lapse shot of a fountain in Central Park, but after a minute it starts to rain, so he packs up. Reviewing the few shots later, he discovers something remarkable: "Directly in the middle of the frame, as if I had planned it: a man proposing to his girlfriend." (via RC )

    • Because **** St Johns Wort and **** Infusions of Wank - In praise of science as an improvement on folk remedies (or "alternative medicine" as idiots call them): "Folk in the Middle Ages used mouldy bread to treat wounds, which probably worked a lot better than praying and tulip, but it took ****loads of smart pricks with clipboards and lab coats and glasses and tulip years to work out what was going on and make it work better."

    • Time's Inverted Index - Paul Ford discovers that having a fully-indexed archive of his correspondence over the last sixteen years was creating a false impression of his younger self: "The pattern-seeking engine in my brain would fire on all cylinders and make a story of the searches, creating an unintentional email-chrestomathy, a greatest-hits collection of ideas I'd had around a single word or phrase. The results seemed weirdly definitive. I thought I was doing history in a mirror, but because the emails were pure matches for key terms, devoid of all but a little context, I fell for the historical fallacy..."

    • Manul – the Cat that Time Forgot - "Have you ever wanted to take a trip through time to see what animals looked like millions of years ago? When it comes to cats there is little or no need. This beautiful specimen is a Manul, otherwise known as Pallas’s Cat. About twelve million years ago it was one of the first two modern cats to evolve and it hasn’t changed since. The other species, Martelli’s Cat, is extinct so what you are looking at here is a unique window in to the past of modern cats." Aw, kitty kitty kitty...

    • Tracking Device Teardown - "We partnered with Wired to bring you a peek inside an FBI car-tracking device. The device is similar to the one Yasir Afifi found underneath his car. If you're curious where this one came from, Wired has posted a writeup about Kathy Thomas, the woman who found this tracker under her car." Those batteries are pretty awesome... well, insofar as the adjective "awesome" can be applied to batteries.

    • The Internet Museum of Flexi / Cardboard / Oddity Records - "Once bound by cereal boxes, held in the pages of a magazine, wrapped up in envelopes sent through our postal system or given away casually with some product, these bits of paper and plastic yearned to be set free to fulfill their destiny as... PLAYABLE RECORDS." Yes, this postcard featuring "The Masked Guitarist" is also a 78rpm record:


    • 10 Odd Things to Say to Someone with Breast Cancer - Ann Pietrangelo found that people's responses on hearing of her diagnosis varied considerably in tone: "Here's my Top 10 'They said what!?' List".

    • An Algorithm for the Names at the 9/11 Memorial - "As long as it took to find and kill Osama bin Laden after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, it has taken even longer to commemorate the thousands he killed... last week, a few hours before President Obama paid a visit to Ground Zero, Joe Daniels, the president of the foundation in charge of the memorial, pronounced that the memorial will be open to the public on the day after the attacks’ tenth anniversary, four months hence. Like Administration officials recounting the milestones in the bin Laden search, Daniels enumerated some of the now surmounted obstacles. The big break in the case, it turns out, was the invention of an algorithm for sorting the dead."

    • The Inside Story of How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks - No, not journalists, more the secret police: "For Tunisians, it was another run-in with Ammar, the nickname they've given to the authorities that censor the country's Internet. They'd come to expect it... Facebook's security team couldn't prove something was wrong in the data. It wasn't until after the new year that the shocking truth emerged: Ammar was in the process of stealing an entire country's worth of passwords."

    • Inverted Art Made with Spools of Thread - "If you're in Paris right now... Devorah Sperber is showing some fantastic works that I'm sure you'd want to see in person. What Sperber does is take multi-colored spools of thread and arranges them in a way so that they appear like pixels. Taken as a whole, the spools look like a "hot mess," in other words, like your grandma went crazy and glue gunned her thread collection on a wall. Look through a "viewing sphere" (a small, transparent ball) that's conveniently placed in front of the piece, however, and get ready to be amazed." If that whets your appetite, Sperber's own site has the complete collection.


    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    From some body else? Is it b3ta again?
    ‎"See, you think I give a tulip. Wrong. In fact, while you talk, I'm thinking; How can I give less of a tulip? That's why I look interested."

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