It may rain later, so you're probably safest wasting your time on the Internet 
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- The Solar Eclipse vs. Solar Electricity - How will the US electrical supply system, already barely holding together under normal use, cope with the forthcoming solar eclipse? ”In March 2017, solar provided a record 2 percent of all the electricity used nationwide. And for three hours on March 11, the electricity used by Californians was about 50 percent solar. That’s a big deal because our electric grid wasn’t designed with solar power in mind. Frankly, our electric grid — the network of wires connecting power plants to your home outlets and back again — wasn’t really designed at all.”
- Martin Crane's hideous chair was the true star of Frasier - Helen Lewis argues that the beat-up recliner epitomised the fundamental spirit of the show: ”Doesn't that chair look more comfortable to sit on than the expensive suede couch - ‘an exact replica of the one Coco Chanel had in her Paris atelier’? This is a metaphor for how family relationships are battered, worn and cosy rather than beautifully best-china pristine, and it's a damn sight more subtle than Ross getting a monkey as a baby-substitute.”
- ‘See It Like Jones Would’ - ”A series of short essays that discuss select anecdotes and insights from the life of R. V. Jones, the mastermind of British scientific intelligence during World War II. Dr. Jones’ exploits remain some of the best examples of artful, competitive thinking available to modern analysts, decision makers, and red teamers." This will give a taste of Jones’ ingenious and devious ways of thinking to those of you unfortunate enough to have missed the 1970s documentary series Most Secret War, based on his book of the same name (which is highly recommended and can be found quite cheap from secondhand booksellers)
- The Natural Alternative? Part 1 - The Ketogenic Diet, Part 2 - Revenge of the Chef, Part 3 - The Bulltulip Menace Awakens - Anthony Warner is a chef who was formerly a scientist, and he gets annoyed by pseudo-science about nutrition: ”There seems to be a number of highly dangerous individuals out there, exploiting vulnerable people for commercial gain. Exposing this sort of thing is exactly what we do, and I am reliably informed that these posts will make a small number of these charlatans extremely unhappy."
- 12 Bizarre Toys That Wouldn’t Be Made Today - "Who didn't love playing with toys when they were kids? We'll tell you who: joyless idiots who'd walk around with their noses in the air going "God, you're so immature because you play with toys". What's the alternative, sad-face - spending the rest of your life filling out life insurance applications, and talking about curtains and gym memberships, and never again playing? Pffft! We know what we'd rather do. Unfortunately, not everything that was once considered appropriate for children is still suitable in this era of political correctness and health & safety."
- Why I built the DickPicLocator™ - "On August 8 I launched dickpiclocator.com, a service that invites you to upload an unsolicited dick pic and find out the exact location where the picture was taken. As I start writing this, 31 hours later, 932 images have been uploaded — an average of 30 pics per hour." Per Axbom on the various ethical issues involved.
- An arcane American law protected by powerful interests is causing insane traffic jams - Erik Olsen explains why Americans move so much freight with trucks: ”In the US, a measly 2% of domestic freight distributed among the lower forty-eight states travels by water, even though half the population lives near the coast. One big reason why is an obscure law, enacted right after World War 1, called the Jones Act, which preserves a monopoly for US-built, owned and operated ships to transport goods between US ports."
- Sea Traders Are Revisiting WWII-era Navigation Tools Amid Fears About Cyber Attacks - Still all at sea: what happens if systems such as GPS are subverted? ”About 90% of world trade is transported by sea and the stakes are high in increasingly crowded shipping lanes. Unlike aircraft, ships lack a back-up navigation system and if their GPS ceases to function, they risk running aground or colliding with other vessels.”
- MakeGirls.moe - This site uses AI to generate anime girls. From the technical report describing the project: ”Automatic generation of facial images has been well studied after the Generative Adversarial Network(GAN) came out. There exists some attempts applying the GAN model to the problem of generating facial images of anime characters, but none of the existing work gives a promising result. In this work, we explore the training of GAN models specialized on an anime facial image dataset.” When this link was retweeted by @SwiftOnSecurity a few hours ago, responses included “has science gone too far” and “computers were a mistake”
- How They Nearly Destroyed Covent Garden - ”In the sixties and seventies Covent Garden, as a place to live and work, was still a very run-down and shabby part of the West End… [the Greater London Development Plan] proposed, astonishingly, but as was often the wont in those days, that over two-thirds of the historic Covent Garden area should be razed to the ground.” Phase Two would have included demolishing The Harp
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