Teeming down here. Luckily it was sunny when I left home this morning, so I didn't bring a coat 
Happy invoicing!
- Artificial jellyfish built from rat cells - Weird and wonderful innovation at the cutting edge of biology: "Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat."
- Why Crunch Modes Doesn't Work: Six Lessons - "There's a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It's the single most expensive way there is to get the work done." Evan Robinson goes into great detail about the disadvantages of death marches, complete with numerous citations from the academic literature on the subject.
- Various Forms of Lithic Disguise - Examination of the Swiss approach to defence from invasion: "To keep enemy armies out, bridges will be dynamited and, whenever possible, deliberately collapsed onto other roads and bridges below; hills have been weaponized to be activated as valley-sweeping artificial landslides; mountain tunnels will be sealed from within to act as nuclear-proof air raid shelters; and much more." Bonus: this video examines a concealed gun emplacement in Interlaken, now open as a museum:
- Dawn of the Flick: The Doctors, Physicists, and Mathematicians Who Made the Movies - a look at Phenakistoscopes, Zoetropes, Praxinoscopes and more: "What Dr. Paris and others were trying to demonstrate was the theory of persistence of vision, which held that because the eye could retain an image for a fleeting period of time (or so it was thought), that image would fill the gap between it and the next one the eye encountered."
- Programming Electronic Music in Pd - The missing manual for the open source music creation software Pd: "This tutorial is designed for self-study, principally for composers. It begins with explanations of basic programming and acoustic principles then gradually builds up to the most advanced electronic music processing techniques."
- The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies - Cryptome provides a wealth of information on techniques used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies dealing with online forums: "Remember these techniques are only effective if the forum participants DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THEM. Once they are aware of these techniques the operation can completely fail, and the forum can become uncontrolled."
- On becoming a cyborg - "First: the backstory. I’m slowly going deaf. No one knows why. First doctor blamed rock’n'roll. Next one blamed my genetics. I’m still waiting for video games and teen sex to be indicted. They all agree that it’s irreversible. Just tulipty luck. Today I went to have some phones fitted – something I’ve been putting off for quite a few years." Frank Swain on his first experience with hearing aids.
- All Work and No Play Make the Baining the "Dullest Culture on Earth" - This indigenous people of Papua New Guinea regard play as shameful and work all the time; work is also the only thing they will talk about, making them extremely tedious: "Jeremy Pool, a graduate student in anthropology, spent more than a year living among them in the attempt to develop a doctoral dissertation. He too found almost nothing interesting to say about the Baining, and the experience caused him to leave anthropology and go into computer science."
- First Digital 3D Rendered Film (from 1972) and My Visit to Pixar - "This is really neat. It’s a very very early digital 3D rendered film (family lore is that it’s the first, ever). It looks old because it is. It was created in 1972 by Ed Catmull (the founder of Pixar) and Fred Parke with a little help from my dad."
- "Discovering Dad" aka delving into Terry Gilliam's personal archive - Terry Gilliam's daughter blogs about her father's work: "In October 2011 I took on the mamouth task of organising my father's archive - all his work from pre-Python days, as a cartoonist, photojournalist & assistnat editor for Help! magazine, through all his original artwork and cut-outs for Python animation, posters, logos and generally everything Python, to his storyboards, designs and sketches for his feature films and other non-film related projects (including his opera of "Faust" and that infamous Nike commercial). Why!? Because I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by my father's amazing work all my life and I think it should be seen by everyone so I am organising the archive so it can eventually be put in a book and an exhibition." Stuff like these well-known flowers:
Happy invoicing!
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