Busy, busy, busy! You lot, can you summarise all this for me:
Happy invoicing!
- A Pig Bang Theory - American pig farms have started spontaneously exploding, and scientists are trying to work out why: "It began like any other phone call for a CFANS Extension engineer. A farmer with a problem, albeit an odd one: Some kind of foam was suddenly bubbling up through the slats in the floor of his hog barn... As recently as September 2011, the foam has caused about a half-dozen explosions in the upper Midwest, where this phenomenon is centered. One explosion destroyed a barn on a farm in northern Iowa, killing 1,500 pigs and severely burning the worker involved."
- 10,000 Top Passwords - Mark Burnett collates data from security breaches: "I have collected a large number of new passwords bringing my current list to about 6,000,000 unique username/password combos, including many of those that have been recently made public... At some point I will make this full data set publicly available but in the meantime, I have decided to release the following list of the top 10,000 most common passwords."
- No girls allowed - "Unraveling the story behind the stereotype of video games being for boys" Tracey Lien goes over the history of video games in great depth, looking at the ways gender bias arose in an industry where it was originally absent.
- Brixton Redevelopment - This site is a facsimile of a report on plans for the redevelopment of Central Brixton produced by the local authority in 1963. Naturally, it involves lots of knocking stuff down and putting wide roads everywhere.
- Cliff Strike 11/24/2013 - Base jumper leaps from cliff; base jumper immediately slams back into cliff; base jumper keeps banging into cliff all the way to the bottom
"Compression Fracture of the T12 Vertebra, 5 stitches to the eye, 6 stitches to the chin, severely sprained Back, wrist and hand. multiple bruised areas." Luckily for us, he was wearing not one, but two cameras; and there was somebody recording down below too.
- WHAT THE FLUCK! - Adam Curtis on the history of journalism, capitalism, and Diana Dors: "To get the story he paid Diana Dors £35,000 which was an extraordinary amount for that time... It was a complete humiliation for Diana Dors, and it shocked the nation. The Archbishop of Canterbury described her as "a wanton hussey"."
- Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data - The ACLU contemplates the future; or possibly the present: "We now know that the NSA is collecting location information en masse. As we’ve long said, location data is an extremely powerful set of information about people. To flesh out why that is true, here is the kind of future memo that we fear may someday soon be uncovered."
- Harvard's Secret "Computers" - "Astronomer Edward Pickering dreamed of mapping the night sky. When he began his tenure as director of the Harvard College Observatory in 1881, technological advances brought him closer to his dream by making it easier than ever to image stars. He arrived to a galaxy of data in the form of hundreds of glass photonegatives of the star-filled skies. The only problem? There weren’t enough staff members to catalog it all. So Pickering turned to computers — long before the existence of laptops and PCs. Back then, the ”computers” were women."
- 12 Mistakes Nearly Everyone Who Writes About Grammar Mistakes Makes - Jonathon Owen on pedantry and prescriptivism: "There are a lot of bad grammar posts in the world. These days, anyone with a blog and a bunch of pet peeves can crank out a click-bait listicle of supposed grammar errors. There’s just one problem—these articles are often full of mistakes of one sort or another themselves. Once you’ve read a few, you start noticing some patterns."
- Cigarette cards life hacks - From cigarette packs of the early 20th century, a selection of useful tips, such as how to deal with a mad dog:
Happy invoicing!
