Whoops, almost missed lunchtime! JIT links:
Happy invoicing!
- Whaddya want from me? - "One dog goes one way and the other dog goes the other way." In the film Goodfellas, Tommy's mother (played by Martin Scorsese's own mother, Catherine) proudly displays her painting of a white-haired man in a boat with two dogs. Inspired by a friend's re-creation of the painting, which was itself based on a photograph in National Geographic, Alex Godfrey looked into the image's origins, and discovered the remarkable story of the white-haired man, a retired banker who lived on the River Shannon.
- Hier Wohnte // Neukölln’s newest Stolpersteine Holocaust memorials - "If you live in Berlin and haven’t yet noticed the Stolpersteine, you haven’t been paying attention. These little brass-covered cobblestones–or stumbling blocks, as the project name roughly translates to–are installed into the sidewalk in front of the last homes of Holocaust victims, each stone engraved with one individual’s name and basic details about their fate." Hilda Hoy watched the installation of seven new Stolpersteine in her Berlin neighbourhood.
- How to avoid defamation - Lawyer Steven Price offers a list of ways to avoid being sued for defamation, which might be of value to certain users of Internet forums: "Still, defamation lawsuits, when they occur, are usually expensive, technical, drawn-out, stressful affairs. You are better off avoiding them if you can. So it makes sense to minimise the risks. You can do that by writing in a way that makes it hard to sue you." Or, to put it another way: all the snark, none of the risk
- The P. G. Wodehouse Globe Reclamation Project - Great work by a group of Wodehouse scholars and enthusiasts in reclaiming some of his earliest work, which was published anonymously in the By The Way column of the Globe and Traveller newspaper: "Wodehouse contributed to “By The Way” intermittently from August 16, 1901 up to August 1903, when he joined the paper as full-time assistant, working six days a week; a year later he was put in charge of the column, a position he held until he left the paper, as best can be determined around 1910. His meticulously-kept cash journal Money Received for Literary Work records his payments for columns from 1901 up to the last entry in February 1908. By his own accounting, he worked on over 1,300 “By The Way” columns."
- Despacio: the 50,000-watt sound system designed for discerning audiophiles - "The stacks in question are the seven 3.5-metre-tall speaker stacks that make up a monster, 50,000-watt sound system called Despacio. It was designed by LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, along with legendary audio engineer John Klett and mashup masters 2ManyDJs (David and his brother Stephen Dewaele). After two years of development, Despacio made its debut over three nights in Manchester's New Century Hall in July. In December, the team is bringing the ten-tonne system to London's Hammersmith Town Hall." Zeity has three of these
- The Value of Content - "I made a Tumblr that accidentally went viral. For a year or so I’d been collecting screengrabs of websites that obscure their content behind modal overlays, begging for newsletter signups, follows, likes, or even adverts that direct you to another site entirely. In the words of Brad Frost, bulltulip. Throughout that year they were becoming more and more prevalent and more and more invasive. I made a Tumblr site to collect them on, called it Tab Closed; Didn’t Read and posted one lone tweet announcing it to the world... I quickly discovered I was not alone. Thousands of people tweeted the URL, it made the front pages of Hacker News and Reddit, and submissions started pouring in." Andy Beaumont discusses "the first wave of the second world pop-up war."
- Reverse-Engineering a Genius (Has a Vermeer Mystery Been Solved?) - "David Hockney and others have speculated—controversially—that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas—the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn & Teller—may have solved the riddle." I like the way he even built a replica of the harpsichord, just to have something to paint
- How to write about the north - Stuart Maconie offers advice to journalists forced to visit the dreadful wastelands beyond the Midlands by heartless editors: "Try to evoke a vague, slightly chilly sense of up-thereness and isolation. Mention any traffic problems on your journey, failure of lineside equipment near Stockport or any particularly awful baguette you were offered on the train. Ask: did you know they have wi-fi and sushi?"
- San Francisco’s Secret DC Grid - SF has had to keep a DC distribution grid for years, because there are so many elevators ("lifts" in English) that require it: "Existing DC winding-drum elevators, however, have stubbornly resisted exile to the scrap heap, in no small part with support from local elevator repair firms such as Erik Bleyle’s. Bleyle Elevator makes replacement parts, rebuilds DC motors, and designs custom circuits to sustain these machines from a bygone era. Bleyle admits that repairs can be pricey, especially hand-rewinding a DC motor, which can run between US $30 000 and $40 000. But he says even a refurbished motor looks cheap compared with the $500 000 cost of replacing the elevator, not to mention the months of involuntary stair climbing during the upgrade."
- archery - All kinds of animated patterns, with Mathematica code for generating them. This is one of the less-hectically animated ones:
Happy invoicing!
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