What a lovely day to not have to travel on the A14 
Happy invoicing!
- The Peekaboo Paradox - "This unmarried, 35-year-old community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day workweek. Not bad for a complete idiot." Profile of a highly successful Washington DC children's entertainer: there's more to him than meets the eye...
- Love Hotels and Unicode - Good explanation of Unicode, and how it came to include characters like "Pile of poo" alongside more traditional glyphs such as "Latin capital letter A".
- How One Response to a Reddit Query Became a Big-Budget Flick - "...Erwin started typing. He posted his answer in a series of comments in the thread. Within an hour, he was an online celebrity. Within three hours, a film producer had reached out to him. Within two weeks, he was offered a deal to write a movie based on his Reddit comments. Within two months, he had taken a leave from his job to become a full-time Hollywood screenwriter." How come this never happens at CUK?
- Project Sentry Gun - "This sentry gun autonomously tracks, aims, and shoots at targets..." Open source hardware and software project for building a gun that autonomously identifies targets via a video feed and opens fire on them: "Now in use on six continents!"
- Confessions of a Car Salesman - "We hired Chandler Phillips, a veteran journalist, to go undercover by working at two new car dealerships in the Los Angeles area. First, he would work at a high-volume, high-pressure dealership selling Japanese cars. Then, he'd change over to a smaller car lot that sold domestic cars at "no haggle" prices."
- A Woman's Story - "A little over sixty years ago, a young, intelligent black woman named Gwen was graduating from Allenby Junior Public School in Toronto..." Battling prejudice against both her race and sex, Gwen Barzey went on to become a senior figure in the nascent data processing industry.
- The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 - "The following are excerpts from journals I kept starting in 1985, when I graduated from college. They tell the story of how Prince of Persia came to be, and almost didn’t." Jordan Mechner also announced last week that he'd rediscovered the Apple II floppies with the source code of Prince of Persia, and Jason Scott of archive.org has travelled to LA to preserve the data for posterity.
- DRACO: Death to the Virus - "In a paper published 27 July [1], researchers from MIT reported successful tests in mice with a new drug that holds the promise of being a cure to all viruses. The drug, DRACO (Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer), works as a “broad-spectrum” antiviral, killing virus-hijacked cells by targeting double-stranded RNA produced in the viral replication process. DRACO proved successful against all 15 viruses tested..." It'll be a few years before there's any chance of using this in humans, but it could do for viral infections what antibiotics did for bacterial ones.
- Hard hats and Trimphones - Maggie Philbin goes up in the world: "I was invited to explore the BT Tower, a building that has real resonance for me. As a kid, I watched it being built and was astonished something that shape could stand without toppling over. As a grown up, I still love it. A functional, striking and brave icon of Sixties London and still the hub of live pictures and digital data."
- WTF Comcast - The people who write the programme descriptions for American cable TV operator Comcast have a tendency to go off-message from time to time, it appears:
Happy invoicing!
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