Bored of gazing out of the window at the dismal drizzle? Now you can get bored of gazing into the dismal Internet instead 
Happy invoicing!
- The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit - "For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest.” (Link to printable version to avoid annoying pagination; paginated version is here, if you prefer that.)
- On the Empire of the Ants - Scott Locklin gives an overview of fascinating research into ant communications by Boris Ryabko and Zhanna Reznikova: ”[They] measured the information processing abilities of ants, and the information capacity of ant languages… In our degenerate age where people think cell phone apps are innovations, it is probably necessary to explain why this is a glorious piece of work.”
- The underground manure railway of Hyde Park Barracks, London - Another secret military railway uncovered, ”…built entirely for the conveyance of horse dung.”
- The Witness - "For more than a decade, it was Michelle Lyons’s job to observe the final moments of death row inmates — but watching 278 executions did not come without a cost."
- Fully Functional 1 KB Hard Drive in Vanilla Minecraft - If you play Minecraft, you’re probably going to want to know how to build IT infrastructure in that virtual world, right? ”I use a LOT of pistons to push a bunch of blocks around in a loop. By switching between solid and clear blocks in this loop, I can store data. My hard drive has a spin speed of 1 byte per 8 redstone ticks.”
- How the zebra got its stripes, with Alan Turing - "In 1952 a mathematician published a set of equations that tried to explain the patterns we see in nature, from the dappled stripes adorning the back of a zebra to the whorled leaves on a plant stem, or even the complex tucking and folding that turns a ball of cells into an organism. His name was Alan Turing." Having been neglected for a number of years, Turing’s work is now seen as providing an important model for describing certain biological processes.
- GES028 - Temperance Hospital, London - Guerrilla urban exploration of this abandoned site behind Euston station: ”On a darkened night, I got to a park at the back of the site. Just as I was about to climb the park's fence, a police car pulled off the Euston Road, I casually walked off along the road until they'd gone. Then went for another go, when a taxi unhelpfully stopped a few metres from the gate I was going to climb. After 5 mins, I decided sod it, and struggled over a more difficult bit of the fence into the park. I then nipped into the darkness of the park and had more railings to climb to get into the LTH site. Luckily a gravestone helped me.”
- Different rules apply - Matt Zoller Seitz on realising what white privilege really means in the USA: ”…having grown up in a mostly black neighborhood near Love Field airport in Dallas, and having been a diligent liberal for most of my adult life, I already knew there was such a thing as white privilege, and was properly horrified by it, but I didn't truly understand what it meant, on a deep level, until one summer night in 2006, when I was spared arrest or worse thanks to the color of my skin.”
- What Do Talking Apes Really Tell Us? - "The strange, disturbing world of Koko the gorilla and Kanzi the bonobo." For all this garbage in the news about Koko being sad that Robin Williams had died, it seems that in reality these “talking” great apes have a pretty crappy life by normal ape standards
- Pop Sonnets - pop songs rewritten in the style of Elizabethan sonnets. For example, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air by Will Smith:
Happy invoicing!
Comment