Rain on the horizon. Thank goodness we don't need reality any more 
Happy invoicing!
- How the “lost” Mac intro video was found (and got my name stuck to it) - "In 2004 Andy Hertzfeld was building Folklore.org, his amazing now-famous website devoted to first-person stories of the earliest days of the Mac. Andy was writing one of the key stories of the saga, the one about the day of the Mac's public unveiling. I mentioned to Andy that I had a video of the intro, and he was welcome to watch it to spur his memory of the great day. So Andy came over, we watched the video, he took notes, and wrote his story. In the comments Andy was kind enough to thank me for showing him the video... Right away, people were interested in seeing the video. I recorded the video over the air in 1984 from a public TV station that rebroadcast the event. Then it sat on a shelf for awhile - OK, for 20 years - until it apparently became something rare." Scott Knaster on how he came to have apparently the only copy of the video of Steve Jobs launching the Mac.
- Vikings—They’re Just Like Us! Social Networks in Norse Sagas - "Though they were only written down in the 13th and 14th Centuries, much of the Icelandic Sagas read like histories of Viking settlements in Iceland several hundred years before, including realistic-sounding journeys of exploration and discovery. Some of them seem rather less plausible; see the Saga of Erik the Red, where Erik’s son is shot in the stomach by a one-legged man-creature on the shores of North America who escapes by hopping up a stream. A great deal of scholarship is devoted to the not-insignificant task of determining to what extent the events really happened. Now a new statistical study concludes that the social networks described in the sagas at least are realistic, sharing many qualities with ones in the real, modern world."
- Ecstasy in London? Heroin in Zagreb? The Answer Is Found In The Sewers - Turns out it's possible to get a good idea of how much illegal drug use is going on somewhere by analysing sewage: "When people take drugs, they are either unchanged or the body turns them into metabolites before they're excreted."The amphetamine levels go through the roof during finals," Burgard said."
- Beautiful Web Type - "There are over 600 typefaces in the Google web fonts directory. Many of them are awful. But there are also high-quality typefaces that deserve a closer look." A project by Chad Mazzola showcases good, free typefaces for the web with elegant typographic design.
- Einstein’s Camera: How one renegade photographer is hacking the concept of time. - "Adam Magyar is a computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. But nobody had ever suggested that he might also be a terrorist until the morning that he descended into the Union Square subway station in New York." Good profile of the photographer, with examples of his work including this slow-motion video from Alexanderplatz station in Berlin:
- How A Dog Has Lived For Eleven Thousand Years–In Other Dogs - "A dog that was born 11,000 years ago stumbled across the elixir of life, and is still alive today. It didn’t find immortality through a diet of mung beans or daily doses of resveratrol. Instead, that ancient dog employed a more radical solution. Some of its cells became cancerous and invaded other dogs, and those dogs then spread its cells to still other dogs. That ancient dog lives on today in the bodies of countless dogs around the world today." Interesting article from NatGeo, though one expects something a bit better from them than that repetition of "today"
- How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love - "McKinlay, a lanky 35-year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like Match.com, J-Date, and e-Harmony, and he’d been searching in vain since his last breakup nine months earlier... On that early morning in June 2012, his compiler crunching out machine code in one window, his forlorn dating profile sitting idle in the other, it dawned on him that he was doing it wrong. He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user. Instead, he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician." Clever process for ensuring suitable matches, though with some possible pitfalls: "Most unsuccessful daters confront self-esteem issues. For McKinlay it was worse. He had to question his calculations."
- Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500 - Drew Philp on buying a derelict house in a partly-abandoned neighbourhood in what many regard as a failed city: "When I told the neighbors I wanted to buy it, they looked at me like I was insane. A young white kid stuck out like a snowball in Texas, and I was self-conscious and very aware of my color, stumbling over my replies for the first time in my life. When I was moving in, most other people, white and black, were moving out."
- No, Jane Austen Was Not a Game Theorist - William Deresiewicz's scathing review of "Michael Suk-Young Chwe’s abominable volume" Jane Austen: Game Theorist is also a great disquisition on the nature of both art and science: "Austen knew, in other words, that human motivation is enormously complex. Reducing it to any single factor—well, for that you need a social scientist."
- Me and my ZX Spectrum - To go with the First Computers thread, here's home computing in the 1980s in all its refulgent splendour
Happy invoicing!
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