Once these are posted, I can go out foraging for bacon:
Happy invoicing!
- Our Logo Looks Like Underpants: A Case Study in Internationalization - RJMetrics unveiled a new corporate identity, and soon identified a disconcerting trend on social media: "Without exception, every tweet that ever suggested that our logo looks like underpants had come from the United Kingdom."
- ANS - Amazing, Eerie Russian Optical Synth - Now on Every OS - "Before electronics grew in wide use in musical instruments, sound designers took a cue from soundtracks for film. That is, before digital, before analog, there was optical. Sound artists, including a number of brilliant Russian engineers, synthesized sounds by imaging them directly on film and running them over photo-optical sensors, as used in sound film projectors of the time. Evgeny Murzin began the ANS project in 1938 with the idea of turning these into a complete musical instrument, capable of realizing sounds with microtonal accuracy – without the use of musicians. The finished instrument finally came into being in 1958." And now you can run it on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, OS X, and Linux
- Famous Trials - Materials relating to some of the most notable trials in legal history, curated by Professor Douglas Linder: "My original purpose in creating the Famous Trials site was a very modest one. I wanted to post a variety of background materials for students enrolled in my Famous Trials Seminar. There is no single text that works for such a seminar, and requiring my students to purchase, say, fourteen books about fourteen trials seemed out of the question... I fully understand that few twelve-year-olds will get much out of some of the full appellate opinions posted on the site, for example. By the same token, some of the materials on the site (comics, jeopardy games, and various "fun facts") may seem insufficiently serious to some especially serious people."
- In The Picture: Michael Paul Smith - HT to northernladuk for this great piece about a photographer who blends reality and models seamlessly, strictly without the use of Photoshop:
- The Original "Mahna Mahna" - "It's a fair bet that you've heard "Mahna Mahna" from The Muppet Show. If you're of a certain age, just mentioning "Mahna Mahna" starts the tune in your head, and you're off to the races! (Doo-doo-dee-doo-doo, doo-doo-dee-doo!!) But while most of us think of the song as the opening number on the original Muppet Show, its first Muppet rendition came on an early episode of Sesame Street, performed by a trio of then-nameless "anything Muppets" just messing around." Chris Higgins tracks down various manifestations of the classic Muppets song. Turns out Sesame Street wasn't its first appearance...
- All Is Fair in Love and Twitter - As Twitter approaches its IPO, the NY Times has a long piece going into great detail about the various battles between its founders and other board members that brought it to this point: "Genesis stories tend to take on an outsize significance in Silicon Valley... In the Valley, these tales are called “the Creation Myth” because, while based on a true story, they exclude all the turmoil and occasional back stabbing that comes with founding a tech company. And while all origin stories contain some exaggerations, Twitter’s is cobbled together from an uncommon number of them."
- A Preliminary Atlas of Robot Killing Fields - "Our intention is to outline everything that we know — or think we know — about incident OB298. This is an attempt to understand the geography of a drone strike." From Pakistan to Austria, Tim Maly tracks down the places involved in a drone strike which killed grandmother Bibi Mamana, "...along with up to five other people and injuring six to eight of the children. Some other men, maybe three, perhaps militants, may have been caught in the blast. A house and a car may or may not have been destroyed. Either three cows or one buffalo and two goats were also killed."
- Jumpers - Tad Friend on the history of suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, including talking to some of the twenty-six people who have jumped, but survived: "As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”"
- The six hidden penises on the London Tube Map - "Inspired by the ‘hidden animals of the Underground’ that some creative type drew over the Tube lines, we tried to find our own images in London Transport’s classic map."
- Sad Etsy Boyfriends - Girl uses craft skills to make thing; girl wants to sell thing on Etsy; girl dragoons boyfriend into modelling thing. Result:
Happy invoicing!
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