- Revisiting Rosebud: The Mystery of Mary Kane - Michael Atkinson proposes a new interpretation of one of the many aspects of Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane: "There are secrets here, as there must be, as Thomson the newsreel snoop realizes himself holding the jigsaw puzzle, right?... Seven decades later, we’re still that faceless reporter, full of information both unreliable and of questionable integrity but only nominally closer to whatever we might comfortably call the truth."
- Piracy of the 80s and 90s - "I have been interviewed a few times in public media now (Reference 1, Reference 2) about the early days of software piracy but in general I believe I didn’t fully get my point through and I hence take the opportunity to hijack my own forum to set that straight." Pontus Berg on the techniques of early software piracy, and the effects he thinks it had on the industry in the long term.
- 9 Houses Built Just for Spite - "Your town probably has an architectural oddity or two, a building that locals point out to visitors. In many cases, these are spite houses—constructed to make someone mad. Sometimes they block a neighboring house’s view. Sometimes they’re built especially to thwart city planners or challenge city ordinances. In many cases, they’re an odd shape, or are built on a very small lot. Sometimes the houses are already in existence, and are altered to get revenge, like the Australia homeowner who painted his house pink and added a pig snout and a tail to protest a denied building permit." All these examples are in the US, a concrete legacy of long-forgotten feuds.
- Pinterest Fail - It turns out many of the craft projects shared on Pinterest aren't as easy as it seems [bonus link: 'Pinterest stress' afflicts nearly half of moms, survey says]; the failures are catalogued here. I particularly like these Easter chick "cake pops" that end up looking like something out of Aliens:
- Hexagonal Grids - An amazingly thorough resource for game developers, by Amit Patel of Red Blob Games: "Hexagonal grids are sometimes used in games but aren’t quite as straightforward as square grids. I’ve been collecting hex grid resources for nearly 20 years, and wrote this guide to the most elegant approaches that lead to the simplest code, largely based on the guides by Charles Fu and Clark Verbrugge. I’ll describe the various ways to make hex grids (I’ve counted 74 so far!), the relationships between them, as well as some common algorithms. Many parts of this page are interactive; choosing a type of grid will update diagrams, code, and text to match."
- Wikipedia Recent Changes Map - "Wikipedia is constantly growing, and it is written by people around the world. To illustrate this, we created a map of recent changes on Wikipedia, which displays the approximate location of unregistered users and the article that they edit." If you're quick, you can click on the revision to see a diff with the previous version.
- How To Have A Longer Marriage Than Kim Kardashian - "Two decades ago, a team of researchers led by psychologist John Gottman set out to determine one thing: Why do couples get divorced?... funny enough, to understand what each of these behaviors looks like in action, one needs to look no further than America’s favorite briefly-unhappily-married couple: Socialite Kim Kardashian and “basketball player” Kris Humphries." Finally, a use for Keeping Up With The Kardashians
- The Evolution of the Web, in a Blink - In case you hadn't heard, the <blink> tag so beloved of GeoCities and Angelfire users back in the mid-1990s is finally passing away from the earth. Vijith Assar uses its story to explore the history of web browsers: "This new <blink> element was ostensibly a peer of the <b> and <i> tags used to render fonts in bold or italic face, but it was never actually standardized as an officially accepted feature of HTML. The flashing text it created was far more obnoxious—triggering epilepsy later became a concern, even—which is why it was swiftly and viciously maligned by designers."
- Chewing gum for extradural haemorrhage - "From 1984 to 1986 I had the privilege of being chief medical officer (surgery) and consultant surgeon in the Solomon Islands. The country lies in the western Pacific, south east of Papua New Guinea, and has a population of about 250 000. I was its only surgeon, based at Central Hospital, Honiara, on Guadalcanal, one of the many islands. Professionally I had to do things you won't find in any textbook, coping with what was available. This is probably the best example." A remarkable story from the British Medical Journal about brain surgery with limited facilities.
- 9 Film Frames - "An attempt to showcase a film by using only 9 of it’s frames." Here, for example, is Bullitt:
Happy invoicing!
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