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Monday Links from the Fire Alarm Assembly Point vol. CLV

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    Monday Links from the Fire Alarm Assembly Point vol. CLV

    Some stuff for Zeity to read as he waits for the things down the back of his desk to evolve sentience:
    • Happiness Is a Worn Gun: My concealed weapon and me - "Nowadays, most states let just about anybody who wants a concealed-handgun permit have one; in seventeen states, you don’t even have to be a resident. Nobody knows exactly how many Americans carry guns, because not all states release their numbers, and even if they did, not all permit holders carry all the time. But it’s safe to assume that as many as 6 million Americans are walking around with firearms under their clothes." Dan Baum on getting his concealed carry permit, and the culture of guns in the USA.

    • How to Get Startup Ideas - "The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way." Paul Graham on where to look for ideas for your Plan B.

    • 12 Letters That Didn’t Make the Alphabet - "You know the alphabet. It’s one of the first things you’re taught in school. But did you know that they’re not teaching you all of the alphabet? There are quite a few letters we tossed aside as our language grew, and you probably never even knew they existed." I knew about Thorn and Ampersand, but not about Ethel or a few of the others.

    • When An Arm is Really a Leg - "Flipping the X-ray showed Stefan Mundlos, MD, that his hunch was right – the patient’s arms were peculiar and stiff because the elbows were actually knees." Turns out some people have a gene that makes their arms into legs. The homeotic mutation responsible has now been tracked down by genome sequencing.

    • John Kemp Starley, creator of the bicycle that “set the fashion to the world” - Interesting history of the chap who invented the "safety bicycle", which is pretty much the same form we use today, and also did a few other things: "In 1889 the company became J. K. Starley & Co. and in the late 1890s, it became the Rover Cycle Company. After JK Starley’s death this company started to manufacture and sell Rover cars (yes, that’s where Land Rover comes from). In 1888 J.K Starley built Britain’s first electric car."

    • My Experience Leading the Obama Campaign’s Tech Field Office - Catherine Bracy on setting up and running the technology infrastructure behind President Obama's successful campaign: "I was to be the non-technical lead and Angus Durocher, a grizzled veteran of the San Francisco start-up scene (he was early at Blogger and served as the first web developer at YouTube) would lead on all the engineering and technical aspects... In many ways, opening and running this office was a fulfillment of a long-time wish of his—to offer the opportunity for people with tech skills to contribute something they’re good at to an effort they believe in. He likes to tell a story about offering his services to the Kerry campaign in 2004 and being told to head to a phone bank instead."

    • Why Are Dead People Liking Stuff On Facebook? - "Last month, while wasting a few moments on Facebook, my pal Brendan O’Malley was surprised to see that his old friend Alex Gomez had “liked” Discover. This was surprising not only because Alex hated mega-corporations but even more so because Alex had passed away six months earlier... O’Malley says the like was “quite offensive” since his friend “hated corporate bulltulip.”" Something dodgy going on at the Book of Faces?

    • An Interview with an EX-Member of Matt Cutts’s Search Quality team! - I can just about forgive the exclamation mark on the headline, as it isn't often one of these chaps speaks in public about what Google considers SEO spam. "The teams main focus is fighting spam and keeping Google’s search results clean so that the user gets the best possible experience. This is a very important thing for Google if you think about it. Google’s entire earning model relies on the good quality of the organic results, if people didn’t trust organic, they would stop using search and not click on ads anymore."

    • Operation Delirium: Inside the U.S. Military's Chemical-Weapons Tests - "Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of war without killing. He joined the Army in 1956 and left it in 1976, and in that time he did not fight in Vietnam; he did not invade the Bay of Pigs; he did not guard Western Europe with tanks, or help build nuclear launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. Instead, he became the military’s leading expert in a secret Cold War experiment: to fight enemies with clouds of psychochemicals that temporarily incapacitate the mind—causing, in the words of one ranking officer, a “selective malfunctioning of the human machine." Brilliant in-depth look at this dodgy research of the 1960s using substances like LSD and BZ.

    • London Shop Fronts - Emily Webber's gallery of photos of small London shops, such as Dreamland Linen:



    Happy invoicing!

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