Finally confirmed today that my work here is almost done, and I finish next week (on Thursday, due to some weirdness in the way the agent drew up the contract). This means I'm supposed to be writing documentation, when I'd much rather be reading this sort of thing:
Happy invoicing!
- The Story Behind Banksy - "While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a direct connection between an artist and his constituency. “There’s a whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell [one’s art],” Banksy has maintained. “You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.”" Profile of the renowned street artist (or disgusting vandal, depending on how much of a philistine you are
)
- Why You Truly Never Leave High School - I suppose cultural bias is inevitable in New York Magazine, but this article should really be Why You Never Leave Adolescence: "If you’re interested in making sure kids learn a lot in school, yes, intervening in early childhood is the time to do it... But if you’re interested in how people become who they are, so much is going on in the adolescent years."
- Insight - At Nestle, interacting with the online enemy - "It looks like mission control: in a Swiss market town, an array of screens in Nestle's headquarters tracks online sentiment. Executives watch intently as California wakes up, smells the coffee - and says whether it likes it." Big companies are making a huge investment in technology to keep track of, and hopefully improve, their profile on social media.
- Magician-turned-mathematician uncovers bias in coin flipping - "Persi Diaconis has spent much of his life turning scams inside out. In 1962, the then 17-year-old sought to stymie a Caribbean casino that was allegedly using shaved dice to boost house odds in games of chance. In the mid-1970s, the upstart statistician exposed some key problems in ESP research and debunked a handful of famed psychics. Now a Stanford professor of mathematics and statistics, Diaconis has turned his attention toward simpler phenomena: determining whether coin flipping is random." Interesting piece from 2004; it turns out tossing a coin is not, in fact, totally random.
- America's Real Criminal Element: Lead - By aggregating multiple studies, it looks increasingly likely that using lead as an additive in petrol played a huge role in the rise of crime levels in the later years of the 20th century, and its removal in their subsequent fall: "Just this year, Tulane University researcher Howard Mielke published a paper with demographer Sammy Zahran on the correlation of lead and crime at the city level. They studied six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the '50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. 'When they overlay them with crime maps,' he told me, 'they realize they match up.'"
- The Unfollower - "People puzzle me. They really do. I think most of us are probably puzzled by those around them, and the internet of course multiplies the problem to Galactic Zoo proportions." Scottish software developer Matt Gemmell on the various personality types that bedevil those who seek to communicate online.
- How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail - "Soverain isn't in the e-commerce business; it's in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it's been quite successful until now. The company's plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war." If your Plan B uses an online shopping cart, you can thank NewEgg for making the Internet a slightly safer place to run your business
- Human pixels - When they're not busy eating each other, the people of North Korea are expected to participate in ceremonies glorifying the Republic and its leader. Here's a gallery of them doing that: "Fifty-thousand teenagers are turned into living pixels; they create a backdrop to the live displays below in the arena. Every 20 seconds for two hours they hold a different card of colour to create a new collective image. The effect is dramatic, and features an array of uplifting scenes (the Dear Leader's purported birthplace; the revolvers he inherited from his father, etc). Another hundred-thousand people provide the dances, music and gymnastics. Mr Hunter, who has photographed ceremonies and rituals in 65 countries across five continents, says he has never seen anything like it."
- The Never-Before-Told Story of the World's First Computer Art (It's a Sexy Dame) - "During a time when computing power was so scarce that it required a government-defense budget to finance it, a young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen. The year was 1956, and the creation was a landmark moment in computer graphics and cultural history that has gone unnoticed until now." This was the same kind of monitor as was used for classic Atari games like Asteroids and Battle Zone, BTW.
- Paris 1914 - Interesting gallery of colour photographs of Paris in the early 20th century, such as this from the Exposition au Grand Palais, 1909:
Happy invoicing!
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