An accident on the A14 meant I was late at ClientCo which meant I didn't have time for lunch which meant I didn't get around to posting these. Here now though 
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- James Burke: Connections - "Connections explores an Alternative View of Change (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation." And here it is in all its glory: links to 30 programmes, all free to watch on YouTube
- Officer Serrano’s Hidden Camera - "Officer Pedro Serrano walked through the heavy wooden doors of the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx and headed upstairs to the locker room... when he got close to his locker, he noticed something strange. Someone had placed a dozen rat stickers on the door." Serrano secretly videoed his superiors apparently imposing quotas for stop-and-search, which is unconstitutional, and has given evidence against the City of New York in a federal class action lawsuit while continuing to work as a cop.
- Bradshaw’s Guide - In the words of the creator of this site, Paul Robert Flloyd: "Based on the 1866 edition of George Bradshaw’s handbook for tourists using Britain’s nascent railway network, this project puts his historical insights into the hands of a new generation, many of whom use the same routes he described 150 years ago." So far it includes the London and the south-east section of the Guide, with the remaining three sections still to come.
- Is There Any Point to the 12 Times Table? - "My government (I’m in the UK) recently said that children here should learn up to their 12 times table by the age of 9. Now, I always believed that the reason why I learned my 12 times table was because of the money system that the UK used to have—12 pennies in a shilling. Since that madness ended with decimalization the year after I was born, by the late 1970s when I had to learn my 12 times table, it already seemed to be an anachronistic waste of time." John McLoone of Wolfram Research presents a formal mathematical analysis of how useful it is knowing 12 times 12
- She stole another’s identity, and took her secret to the grave. Who was she? - "The woman in question was known as Lori Ruff. A 41-year-old wife and mother, she never quite fit in... Lori died in 2010. That’s when Blake’s relatives found the box. Its contents told an astonishing story: The woman they knew as Lori was someone else entirely. She had created a new identity two decades earlier."
- Watch Pink Floyd Plays Live in the Ruins of Pompeii (1972) - "...the 2003 director’s cut of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, the latest of several versions of the film. It includes not just the band’s Pompeii performance, but additional songs shot in Paris, recording and interviewing sessions at Abbey Road, and a number of clips of exploding volcanoes and Earth from space. The non-concert material further explores themes naturally raised by placing music from 1971 into a venue from 70 BC." Bonus linky: "An [url=http://www.csoonline.com/article/print/221329]article from CSO Security and Risk cites [the amphitheatre's] bathroom design and placement, its queue separation, its anxiety-reducing openness, its simple stairway scheme, its lack of corners and bottleneck points, and the wide road leading to it as qualities from which today’s stadium designers can still learn."[/i]
- Executed Offenders - Between July 12 1982 and last Wdenesday, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has executed 500 people. Texas is one of only two US states to publish online the last statements of these people, given once they are strapped to the gurney and about to receive the lethal injection; and here they are. The other state to publish last statements is California: the state has carried out thirteen executions since 1978 (though fourteen are listed, as one person was extradited to Missouri and executed there).
- The NSA’s early years: Exposed! - "On Oct. 29, 1948, the Soviet Union suddenly changed all its ciphers and codes. What later became known as “Black Friday” delivered a huge shock to the two U.S. intelligence agencies that had conducted the bulk of American code-breaking efforts during World War II and its immediate aftermath. Before Black Friday, the Army’s SIS and the Navy’s OP-20-G complacently assumed that they had acquired the keys to most of the world’s encrypted communications. But with a flip of the switch the U.S. was once again in the dark — just as the Cold War was heating up." Everybody's favourite eavesdropping agency continues to be in the news; here's a summary of a recently declassified history of the agency, and here's the full - well, partially blacked-out - document, scanned in PDF format: It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s – 1960s (50MB file, so you may want to wait until you get home to download that).
- Leading Men Age, But Their Love Interests Don’t - "It seems like time and time again, male movie stars are allowed to age into their forties, fifties, and even sixties while the ages of their female love interests remain firmly on one side of the big 4-0, but is this a perception borne out of reality? To find out for sure, Vulture has analyzed the data of ten middle-aged leading men and the ages of the women they've wooed onscreen; you'll see the results in the charts below." Spoiler: yes, it is a perception borne out in reality
- A-Z of Unusual Words - "Bold graphics and visual wit are used to interpret and represent a collection of strange, unusual and lost words. These images explore the meaning behind the words, which are sometimes even more strange or unusual. This project explores the synthesis between form and content, and words and images with the aim of producing work that is both visually interesting and informative." Fun collection of images and words by The Project Twins, starting with:
Acersecomic
A person whose hair has never been cut.
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