Enjoying the bank holiday sunshine? Thought not. Here's some stuff to read until it goes away:
Happy invoicing!
- Blood Sport: Revisiting Traction… Er, Action, Park - Action Park was an amusement park in New Jersey that became notorious for its high accident rate, yet somehow managed to stay open for twenty years: "Park officials were always quick to point out that the park had over a million visitors each year––maybe 12,000 on a busy weekend––which makes the actual injury rate statistically small. Regardless, enough injuries occurred that Action Park eventually bought the town of Vernon new ambulances to keep up with the injury volume."
- The Story of the QWERTY Keyboard - "It turns out that there is a lot of myth and misinformation surrounding the development of QWERTY, but these various theories all seem to agree that the QWERTY layout was developed along with, and inextricably linked to, early typewriters." Jimmy Stamp tries to establish the true history of the keyboard layout we know and love (or not).
- Achieving Without Goals - Leo Babauta argues that setting oneself goals is not only unnecessary, but a distraction: "For many years I was fixated on goals, but at the same time was also simplifying my work life and working on being more content... I decided to experiment, and see whether goals were really necessary. I found out that they weren’t."
- NeXT Computer - "NeXT Computer (the original 68030 cube) was a high end workstation that was manufactured between 1988 - 1990... At the time, its performance was impressive, with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, a dedicated floating point CPU, and a digital signal processor built into the system. NeXT cubes featured a magneto-optical drive that stored a whopping 256 Megabytes (by comparison, high end Mac systems at the time might have featured a 20 Megabyte hard drive.) In its day, this was the "Ferrari" of desktop systems!" A nice gallery of John Miranda's restored NeXT cube.
- 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes - "How did the U.S. Air Force respond on 9/11? Could it have shot down United 93, as conspiracy theorists claim? Obtaining 30 hours of never-before-released tapes from the control room of NORAD's Northeast head-quarters, the author reconstructs the chaotic military history of that day—and the Pentagon's apparent attempt to cover it up." Fascinating analysis, with sound clips of the actual recordings embedded (though the clips are all transcribed). Conspiracy nuts will be disappointed to find that the apparent attempt at a cover-up was more of an incompetently-organised cover-your-ass exercise... or maybe that's just what they want us to think. (Tip: scroll down to the foot of the first page and click the "Single page" link - it's actually all there, they're just dicking about with JavaScript to make it look paginated because their UX people are twats.)
- They're Made out of Meat - Short sci-fi story by Terry Bisson. "They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
- engineering pornography - Jamie Zawinski rescues a (totally SFW) tale of electrical engineering from a 1989 mailing list: "It turns out they have a problem with an underground wire. Not just any wire but a 230 KV, many-hundred-amp, 10 mile long coax cable. It shorted out... To complicate matters the cable consists of a copper center conductor living inside a 16 inch diameter pipe filled with a pressurized oil dielectric. Hundreds of thousands of gallons live in the entire length of pipe. Finding the fault was hard enough. But having found it they still have a serious problem. They can't afford to drain the whole pipeline - the old oil (contaminated by temporary storage) would have to be disposed of and replaced with new (pure) stuff which they claim takes months to order (in that volume). The cost of oil replacement would be gigantic given that it is special stuff. They also claimed the down time is costing the costing LA $13,000 per hour. How to fix it and fast?"
- I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet - "In early 2012 I was 26 years old and burnt out. I wanted a break from modern life — the hamster wheel of an email inbox, the constant flood of WWW information which drowned out my sanity. I wanted to escape... At 11:59PM on April 30th, 2012, I unplugged my Ethernet cable, shut off my Wi-Fi, and swapped my smartphone for a dumb one. It felt really good. I felt free." Paul Miler on a year in TRW.
- Skin - "The lampshade emerged from the wreckage of Katrina. But was it really what it appeared to be—a Buchenwald artifact made of human remains? A Holocaust detective story." Marc Jacobson traces the story of a lampshade that found its way to him from the wreckage of New Orleans.
- Design Jargon Bulltulip - Collection of actual things said by real "creative" companies, e.g. "We formulated a Brand Platform recommendation and an executive consultant facilitated a session to gather input from the working team to refine and finalize the Brand Platform"
Happy invoicing!
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