Not long until I get to do these from the bench again. Given the thick fog lingering over the fens today, I'm looking forward to it 
Happy invoicing!
- The Soviet InterNyet - Interesting history of the USSR’s attempts to network the nation: ”The full title of Glushkov’s plan – The All-State Automated System for the Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning and Governance of the National Economy, USSR – speaks for itself and its epic ambitions. First proposed in 1962, the All-State Automated System, or OGAS, was intended to become a real-time, remote-access national computer network built on preexisting and new telephony wires.”
- The Stranglers’ 1979 cricket match against the UK music press, featuring Lemmy and a bag of drugs - A strange little tale from those halcyon days: ”On September 16, 1979, the Stranglers held a cricket match to promote their new album The Raven and raise money for Capital Radio’s charity Help A London Child. They assembled a black-clad group of punk and reggae musicians to face a team made up of their usual adversaries and objects of abuse: rock journalists.”
- GifCities: The Geocities Animated GIF Search Engine - ”GifCities is a special project of the Internet Archive to celebrate 20 years of preserving the web." You never realised before that what the world needs more than anything is a search engine for 1990s-era animated GIFs
- Answer to “Why would PMCs be in politically-unstable places, as opposed to waiting in comfort to be called?” - HT to quackhandle for this fascinating answer on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, in which a “private military contractor” (aka a mercenary) explains how he goes about getting gigs. JobServe it isn’t: ”Usually an office that is already in position will get a call at the 11th hour with a desperate need for diplomatic security. Not ten minutes later a few of us are running up and down the street knocking on doors, calling each other "Do you have any solid guys and a few locals you can bring on a run to X in two days?" and "Hey, do you still have that bigass armored bus? How about the bricked-out Mercedes and the Rhino, are they out of the shop yet?" and so on.”
- This Guy Is Replicating ‘Blade Runner’ Shot-for-Shot in MS Paint - One for Zeity: ”When we discovered David MacGowan’s tumblr MSP Blade Runner, our response was one of collective awe and fascination. MacGowan is quite literally going through Blade Runner shot-by-shot and illustrating each in MS Paint. The drawings aren’t perfect in terms of artistry—it is MS Paint, after all—and they’re not 100 percent complete in detail. But each moment is instantly recognizable even to someone with only a passing familiarity with the film.” Here’s a direct link to the MSP Blade Runner site.
- Detailled London transport map (track, depot, ...) - If you’ve ever wondered where exactly some closed station on the Tube network is, or how that bifurcation of the Northern Line south of Camden Town is structured, this is the map you need, showing the physical structure of the network in tremendous detail
- 20 CDs curated by Steve Jobs & the iPod team - Nobuyuki Hayashi on an unexpected bonus for journalists who covered the iPod launch in 2001: ”After announcing the original iPod, Steve Jobs' said Apple has prepared about 250 prototypes of the original iPods which the invited journalists can take away (but later return). The iPod was loaded with music from 20 CDs, so the journalists can try iPod out on the way back home. Steve Jobs insisted that Apple has no intention of stealing away the sales of the music industry; remember this was way before iTunes Music Store. What Apple did to keep its word is buying same number of 20 CDs sets and gave it along with the iPod prototypes to the journalists.” And here are the 20 CDs that Apple, and Jobs, thought representative of a range of musical tastes.
- Foreign reporters can’t translate him: Why Trump’s hyperbolic speech fascinates linguists - "After years of complaining their politicians had become scripted robots, U.S. voters were suddenly presented with a candidate who is a linguist’s dream. Donald Trump spouts words, expressions and intonations used by no other would-be president in modern U.S. history… Trump is filling notebooks with terms like “Crooked Hillary,” “like a bitch” and saying Mitt Romney “would have dropped to his knees” for an endorsement in 2012. These can be a bit tricky to render in Hebrew, Mandarin or Russian.”
- This Twitter bot is tracking dictators' flights in and out of Geneva - "A Swiss journalist has created a Twitter bot that tracks dictators’ flights to and from Geneva, as part of a crowdsourced effort to shed light on potentially shady dealings. The bot, called GVA Dictator Alert, tracks planes registered to authoritarian governments and automatically posts their arrivals and departures to Twitter." Look out, NAT, they’re on to you
- Man Arranges Leaves, Sticks, And Stones To Create Magical Land Artworks - "Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy creates transitory works of art by arranging leaves, sticks, rocks or anything else he can find outside."
Happy invoicing!
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