Early night last night meant I was up stupidly early this morning and am now about ready to crash out again 
Better get these posted first, though:
Happy invoicing!
Better get these posted first, though:- Life, After - Miles O’Brien on learning to cope with the loss of his arm: ”…while my arm may be missing physically, it is there, just as it always has been, in my mind’s eye. I can feel every digit. I can even feel the watch that was always strapped to my left wrist. When I tripped, I reached reflexively to break my very real fall with my completely imaginary left hand. My fall was instead broken by my nose, and my nose was broken by my fall.”
- This is what it’s like to be at war with your body - Staying with the topic of amputation, Anil Ananthaswamy on people with Body Integrity Identity Disorder: ”The idea is to freeze the offending limb and damage it to the point that doctors have no choice but to amputate. David drove over to his local Walmart and bought two large trashcans. The plan was brutal, but simple. First, he would submerge the leg in a can full of cold water to numb it. Then he would pack it in a can full of dry ice until it was injured beyond repair.”
- Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth - "To celebrate the publication of the eBooks of The Art of Computer Programming, (TAOCP), we asked several computer scientists, contemporaries, colleagues, and well-wishers to pose one question each to author Donald E. Knuth."
- How To Read Dirty Books For Money - "I'm an audiobook narrator. I'm the voice pouring through your earbuds as you commute to work, sweat it out at the gym, or finish folding laundry. I'm reading you your YA, Fantasy, Inspirational Self Help, whatever you choose to listen to… More often than not though, I'm reading dirty books to you." A plan B for those of you with sufficiently mellifluous voices
- A Pickpocket’s Tale - "A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability… He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale. “****. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair. Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.” Profile of the renowned pickpocket/performer, who has made the study of human attention key to his success. Bonus: here’s a video of his TED talk on the subject (and there are lots of other videos of him on YouTube).
- Murder in Miniature - interesting piece about a woman who devoted her time to reform of the field of legal medicine, including making amazingly detailed miniature models of ghastly crime scenes: ”Frances Glessner Lee, nicknamed “the mother of forensic investigation”… [her] pioneering work in criminal sciences forever changed the course of death investigations."
- *THE* classic Unix horror story - From Usenet, 1986: ”James, our manager, was sat down, head in hands, hands between knees, as one whose world has just come to an end. Our newly-appointed system programmer, Neil, was beside him, gazing listlessly at the screen of his terminal. And at the top of the screen I spied the following lines:
Oh, tulip, I thought.”Code:# cd # rm -rf *
- Bear Encounters - Some handy hints on dealing with bears from the “Get Bear Smart Society”: ”If you are in your campsite or other place bears shouldn't be, and you are sure the bear is a black bear, consider trying to move it out of the area… Never try to move a grizzly bear!”
- Mr. Ten Percent: The Man Who Built — And Bilked — American Soccer - "As the World Cup opens, a tale about winning dirty: How a swindling suburban soccer dad pocketed millions as he helped make the sport in the U.S a booming success." HT to Alias for this one
- Phrasebooks, and what to do with them - "In 1915 The Echo & Evening Chronicle got hold of a copy of Englisches Tornitser Wörterbuch, a German/English phrasebook printed for German soldiers in 1912 or 1913. This appears to have been published to prepare German soldiers linguistically for the process of invasion. Eagerly using this for propaganda purposes, The Echo & Evening Chronicle reprinted parts of it with cartoons by Chas Grave."
Happy invoicing!
