Half term holiday? Drop the kids off at McDonalds, then you can read in peace:
Happy invoicing!
- When elite US forces strapped nukes to their backs - "It's 1972, and Davis isn't far removed from a tour in Vietnam, where he operated along the Cambodian border. His communications sergeant served in Command and Control North, which was responsible for some of the most daring operations in the heart of North Vietnamese territory. But none of the men has ever been on a mission like this before... Hanging awkwardly from the parachute harness of Davis's intelligence sergeant is a 58-pound nuclear bomb. With a weapon this powerful, they can just lay it against a wall, crank the timers, and let fission do its work." Fascinating account of the US military's portable nuclear weapons, intended to be used by small sabotage teams to slow down a Soviet advance into Europe.
- Radio 4 without the Archers - "...here is my Python script that plays the best radio station in the world: Radio 4 without the Archers. It works out the time until the next Archers episode, then plays the Radio 4 stream, slowed down just enough to allow you to skip the next episode." Genius
- Good Samaritan Backfire - Peretz Partensky called 911 to get an ambulance for an injured cyclist in San Francisco. This proved to be a mistake: "I was, in short order: separated from my friend, violently tackled, arrested, taken to county jail, stripped and left in a solitary cell. I am writing this story because, if it could happen to me, it could happen to you, and I feel the need to do something to help prevent this brutality from propagating."
- Hemingway takes the Hemingway test - An app that analyses your prose quality takes Hemingway's idea of simplicity as a goal, but how well does Hemingway's own writing stand up to its automated scrutiny? "Bold and clear, that’s the popular image of the Hemingway persona—the kind of man... who could walk into an Abercrombie & Fitch store, and, being approached by a sales clerk, say, simply, “Want to see coat.”"
- The Men Who Dream of Bigfoot - "A handful of primate researchers believe Sasquatch is real, and they take their search for the creature very—very—seriously." Interesting look at the varied ranks of the Bigfoot believers.
- Everything Was Fake but Her Wealth - "Ida Wood, who lived for decades as a recluse in a New York City hotel, would have taken her secrets to the grave—if here sister hadn't gotten there first." Ah, the days when people would actually live, permanently, in a hotel
- The Oyster Eater – Brixton’s Hungriest Prisoner - John Dando achieved a degree of fame, and spent much of his time in prison, in the early nineteenth century because of his appetite: "He was committed to Brixton for a month in April 1830 charged with devouring, at a coffee shop, ‘3lbs of animal food, a half-quartern loaf, sundry eggs and washing down the whole with upwards of a dozen cups of coffee.’... Oysters, though, were Dando’s weakness... Dando was reputed to have consumed thirty dozen large ones in a single sitting with a proportionate amount of bread and brandy."
- Why it took a year to make, and then break down, an amazing puzzle game - Sometimes, achieving simplicity involves adding stuff and taking it away again until you finally realise that what you started with was right: "They kept trying to add new concepts, new themes and, in some cases, new mechanics. These ideas might have been interesting, but they hid what made the game fun."
- Finding Messages Explicitly Marked as Spam in Gmail - Gmail uses a load of internal labels to manage things, and some of them can be useful; so Mihai Parparita has tracked down as many as he can.
- Computers on Law and Order - In 2012, Jeff Thompson began a project to record every instance of a computer appearing in cop show Law and Order, which ran for 456 episodes over twenty years, as a way of examining how the role of technology in society has changed in that time. He's now posting the screenshots to Tumblr, although it'll take a while to post all ~2,500:
Happy invoicing!
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