Back on the bench, and very relaxing it is too 
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- 1850s & 1860s Hotel and Restaurant Menus - "These mid nineteenth century menus located in the Hospitality Industry Archives, at the Hilton College of the University of Houston reveal a treasure trove of historical information. The menus relate not only the regional cuisine of the particular restaurant but also show some of the cultural and social norms of society. The menus are from hotel restaurants, stand alone restaurants and steamships." If you'd visited Sherman House Hotel, Chicago, on Wednesday July 2 1860, your host P. B. Roberts would have been happy to serve you "Pickerel, au Jelly", "Fried Mush" with "Stewed Cracked Wheat", and "Champaigne Jelly" between the hours of "1 to 3½ O'Clock". Yum!
- Loving Someone With Depression - "Depression is devastating. When someone is suffering from depression, their entire life is blown apart. It can be a massive struggle just to make it through each day. But they aren’t the only ones who struggle. The people who are often forgotten are the loved ones of a person with depression. No-one tells them how to cope. They don’t know what to do. I would like to try and offer some advice to those people." Insightful piece by a recovering sufferer.
- Mupd8 – The @WalmartLabs Real-time Platform - "As we began working with firehoses from various social media sites, we recognized the need for a general-purpose real-time stream processing platform that could address the issues of scale and performance... “Mupd8” came into existence to fulfill that need. At the highest level, Mupd8 does for Fast Data, what Hadoop and the MapReduce computation model do for Big Data." Interesting open-source project (Apache License 2.0) from the big US retailer and owner of ASDA.
- The Mouse Trap: The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease - "Daniel Engber’s three-part series “The Mouse Trap: How One Rodent Rules the Lab” (published in Slate last November) has won the 2012 Communication Award for the online category. The award is conferred annually by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine with funding from the W.H. Keck Foundation to honor “excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine to the general public.” Engber's exploration of the risks of relying on mice for so much of our research brought an underreported scientific problem to light for lay readers. You can revisit the series below."
- Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World - "Our goal is to reveal temporal variations in videos that are difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye and display them in an indicative manner. Our method, which we call Eulerian Video Magnification, takes a standard video sequence as input, and applies spatial decomposition, followed by temporal filtering to the frames. The resulting signal is then amplified to reveal hidden information. Using our method, we are able to visualize the flow of blood as it fills the face and also to amplify and reveal small motions. Our technique can run in real time to show phenomena occurring at temporal frequencies selected by the user." Interesting video enhancement technique developed by Hao-Yu Wu, Michael Rubinstein, Eugene Shih, John Guttag, Frédo Durand and William T. Freeman.
- Memories of Innisfree - "There are boats and buses that will take you to Innisfree and they are completely honest and well-meaning, for the island they will show you is indeed called Innisfree. And you will probably be bewildered and a little disappointed because all you will see is a tiny tree-laden island not far off the shore with no room for docks or moorings let alone beehives or wattle huts. For this is Innisfree... but it is not Yeats’ Innisfree." Ken Armstrong, who grew up near the spot, on what he believes to be the true inspiration for W. B. Yeats famous poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
- Another Seagull Snatches Up a GoPro Camera, This Time at San Francisco’s Crissy Field - "Recently we posted about a seagull that snatched up a GoPro camera in France and went flying around with it. Now a video has been posted by a French tourist named Nathalie Rollandin who had her GoPro camera stolen by a pesky seagull at San Francisco’s Crissy Field. She wrote, “On my way running after the seagull I met a woman and desperately asked ‘Have you seen a seagull flying with a camera in his mouth?’..she looked at me like I was totally crazy haha…”" The seagull drops the camera a little distance away from where it grabbed it, and gets a beautiful shot of itself flying away into the sunset
- The Amazing and Incredible Statistical Atlases of the United States of America compiled in the final decades of The Nineteenth Century - "Not Your Grandfather's Data Visualizations. Probably your great-great-grandfather's, though." Excellent collection of beautiful maps, charts and graphs.
- The Twitter Acid Experience - "One million people in the United States use LSD each year. Far fewer live-tweet it." Twitter user @hella_brad seems to have deleted his tweets from a week or so ago; of course, on the Internet nothing really goes away, so as well as The Atlantic you can also read his tweets while tripping on Storify: "I think this is the nicest day I've ever spent outside in my life... the shadows of the tree I'm sitting under bobbed as I tweeted that and I'm imagining that's nature saying 'yes that's right'"
- Magic: the Gathering is Turing Complete - "We always knew Magic: the Gathering was a complex game. But now it's proven: you could assemble a computer out of Magic cards." Alex Churchill explains how to use the card game for computation
Happy invoicing!
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