Last links of summer; hope they don't turn brown and go 404 in a few weeks:
Happy invoicing!
- Life Atop Ground Zero - Rex Sorgatz on living in an apartment overlooking the WTC site: ”For days on end, nothing happened down there, the dusty embodiment of a bureaucratic lock-up. Months accrued into motionless years, broken only by the occasional lazy afternoon when a bulldozer coughed itself awake, puffing the will to move some earth northward. The next day, revving up again, the dozer pushed the same soil southbound. Back and forth, across 16 inert acres, no change, except the illusion of change.”
- New research on plant intelligence may forever change how you think about plants - ”Can a plant be intelligent? Some plant scientists insist they are — since they can sense, learn, remember and even react in ways that would be familiar to humans." And they’re in your garden, watching, waiting…
- We Have a Winner! and Fool Me Once - Dr Neil Krawetz explains how to use image analysis to detect faked photographs, in this case of supposed jackpot-winning lottery tickets: ”One of the first ones claimed to be from Louisiana and was posted over at 4chan. (4chan? Why am I not surprised...) Error Level Analysis (ELA) immediately identified this fake.”
- Pizza Delivery Stories - "These are true stories that happened while delivering pizza. You may be surprised at what you find. There are 488 stories in the collection and growing." Incidentally, this US-centric site devoted solely to the topic of pizza delivery has been regularly updated since 1998, making it longer-lived than quite a few billion dollar businesses
- The scary truth? There’s nobody in charge - Andrew Mueller on the attraction of conspiracy theories: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be a paranoid crackpot,” Wordsworth might well have written of the summer of 2014, “but to be a full-fledged conspirazoid dingbat was very heaven.”
- Why Archeologists Hate Indiana Jones - "Think about it. Here’s Indy, in some ancient tropical temple whose booby traps have miraculously not turned to dust with age and humidity. All the ropes, wooden blocks, gears, whatever – they still function. This is a treasure trove of information for an archeologist… But no, he goes for the least interesting but most economically valuable thing in the temple – a golden statue.” Erik Vance explains why the “hero” is nothing but a looter.
- Mail Order Friends: The Comic Book Squirrel Monkeys - A few decades ago, you could buy live animals through small ads in comic books, including real monkeys. The results tended not to be very satisfactory for either the purchaser or the monkey: ”I grabbed it by its tail, and it came down on, starting literally up by my shoulder, like a drill press it landed on my arm, and every bite was breaking flesh. It was literally like an unsewing machine. It was literally unsewing my arm coming down, and I was pouring blood.” Bonus link: another tale of mail-order-monkey woe.
- Map of the Stars - How German telecoms companies discovered their networks had been penetrated by the NSA and GCHQ: ”Stellar’s visibly shaken chief engineer, reviewing the same documents, shares his boss’ reaction. “The intelligence services could use this data to shut down the internet in entire African countries that are provided access via our satellite connections,” he says.”
- Inuit Testimony About Franklin - Last week saw the discovery of the wreck of one of the ships from Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated voyage to discover the North West Passage. Turns out the Inuit already had plenty of information about the fate of the expedition, having met briefly with survivors and seen the ships: ”Aglooka pointed with his hand to the southward & eastward & at the same time repeated the word I-wil-ik. The Innuits could not understand whether he wanted them to show him the way there or simply to tell them that he was going there. He then made a motion northward & spoke the word "oo-me-en," making them to understand there were 2 ships in that direction. As Aglooka pointed to the N., drawing his hand & arm from that direction, he slowly moved his body in a falling direction and all at once dropped his head sideways into his hand, at the same time making a kind of combination of whirring, buzzing, & wind blowing noise. This was taken as a pantomimic representation of ships being crushed in the ice.”
- Ben Greenman’s Museum of Silly Charts - A number of charts that may not be particularly informative:
Happy invoicing!
