Fed up with threads about royal pregnancies? Try this lot for size instead:
Happy invoicing!
- The Secret Language of Signs - "They're the most useful thing you pay no attention to. Start paying attention." Five-part series by Julia Turner on the history and development of signs.
- Playboy Interview: Frank Sinatra - First published in February 1963. ”Sinatra: Remember that leering, cursing lynch mob in Little Rock reviling a meek, innocent little 12-year-old Negro girl as she tried to enroll in public school? Weren’t they—or most of them—devout churchgoers? I detest the two-faced who pretend liberality but are practiced bigots in their own mean little spheres. I didn’t tell my daughter whom to marry, but I’d have broken her back if she had had big eyes for a bigot.”
- The Advanced Cave Culling Algorithm™, or, making Minecraft faster - Tommaso Checchi on optimising Minecraft Phone Edition: ”Turns out this culling approach works pretty great with good culling ratios going from 50% to 99% (yes, 99%!) of the geometry, so it allowed us to generate caves on all phones instead than on the most powerful ones only. On top of that, it gave a nice speed boost to Minecraft PC after it was backported
”
- The Real Weird Twitter Is Espionage Twitter - Ken Layne on weird messages scattered around Twitter, such as “Iowa City schools ask state for an audit”: ”These tweets just repeat that phrase, and the accounts don't appear to have any connection to Iowa City or its schools… What does it mean when these accounts—seemingly spread all over the world—spit out this phrase about Iowa City schools? Is the drug plane about to land, somewhere? Has another priest been taken into custody and the militia activated?”
- How to zero a buffer - "In cryptographic applications, it is often useful to wipe data from memory once it is no longer needed… Alas, this is easier said than done.” This is what happens when you use C instead of assembly language; though it turns out we were solving the wrong problem anyway
- On ‘Krazy Kat’ and ‘Peanuts’ - Umberto Eco on comic strips: ”From this absurd situation without particularly comic ingredients, the author drew an infinite series of variations… In a comic strip of this sort, the spectator, not seduced by a flood of gags, or by any realistic or caricatural reference, or by any appeal to sex and violence, could discover the possibility of a purely allusive world, a pleasure of a “musical” nature, an interplay of feelings that were not banal.”
- Inside the Secret World of a British Undercover Drugs Cop - Neil Woods spent 14 years working undercover: “Everything I did while undercover was a waste of time,” he says. “All I did was make the lives of the vulnerable more unbearable.”
- All About Circuits - "This site provides a series of online textbooks covering electricity and electronics. The information provided is great for both students and hobbyists who are looking to expand their knowledge in this field." AKA “Be your own Zeity”
- Holdout - On people who refuse to sell or vacate their property as development continues around them: ”Hess fought them and lost, and when all was said and done, his building was torn down, and he was left with a triangle shaped piece of property. It was about the size of a large slice of pizza… Later, the city tried to get him to donate his pizza-shaped property so that they could build a sidewalk. He refused again. They built the sidewalk anyway, and in the middle of the sidewalk is Hess’s triangle, with a tile mosaic that reads: “Property of the Hess Estate Which Has Never Been Dedicated For Public Purposes.”” You can see Hess’s triangle on Street View
- Questionable Advice - "Maxims, Advice & Cautions in all matters; or, Guidance for the Confused Masses."
Happy invoicing!
