2^8
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- Finally, a New Clue to Solve the CIA’s Mysterious Kryptos Sculpture - Another word of the remaining uncracked panel of the CIA’s sculpture is revealed: ”Four years ago, concerned that he might not live to see the mystery of Kryptos resolved, Sanborn released a clue to help things along, revealing that six of the last 97 letters when decrypted spell the word “Berlin”… To that clue today, he’s adding the next word in the sequence—“clock”.” HTHBIDI
- A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS - "In the past, Amazon has wanted to hint at the scale of its infrastructure without being terribly specific, and so they came up with this metric. Every day, AWS installs enough server infrastructure to host the entire Amazon e-tailing business from back in 2004, when Amazon the retailer was one-tenth its current size at $7 billion in annual revenue… “What has changed in the last year,” Hamilton asked rhetorically, and then quipped: “We have done it 365 more times.”"
- Sinking of USS Guitarro (SSN-665) - The US Navy report on an unfortunate incident with a shiny new nuclear submarine in 1969: ”The Guitarro should not have sunk. It was not overwhelmed by cataclysmic forces of nature or an imperfection in design or an inherent weakness in its hull. Rather, it was sent to the bottom by the action, or inaction, of certain construction workers who either failed to recognize an actual or potential threat to the ship's safety or assumed that it was not their responsibility.”
- A Worm's Mind In A Lego Body - "Take the connectome of a worm and transplant it as software in a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot - what happens next?" The annihilation of the human race by robot Lego worms, one would expect
- The Dark Art of Political B.S. - ”My son turns 14 next month. Over the past year, he has grown in height by six inches. Ponder that for a moment: If current trends continue, he will, by the time of the 2016 election, be seven feet tall.” John F. Harris explains why you shouldn’t trust political punditry.
- Forensic Topology - "In the 1990s, Los Angeles held the dubious title of “bank robbery capital of the world.” At its height, the city’s bank crime rate hit the incredible frequency of one bank robbed every forty-five minutes of every working day… Special Agent William J. Rehder briefly suggests that the design of a city itself leads to and even instigates certain crimes—in Los Angeles’s case, bank robberies. Rehder points out that this sprawling metropolis of freeways and its innumerable nondescript banks is, in a sense, a bank robber’s paradise.” A look at how architecture and urban planning can foster certain types of crime.
- Donger List - "A Donger is a set of unicode characters assembled to form a text emoticon. Sometimes also refered to as emojicons, emoticons, kaomoji, Japanese emoticons, or text faces." Lots of these are rubbish, but there are a fair few good ones ʘ ͜ʖ ʘ
- How to Write a Book in Three Days - "Michael Moorcock is a highly influential English writer. His career has mostly specialised in fantasy and sci-fi, and whilst some of his novels have been highly literary, he was a firm exponent of sword-and-sorcery, particularly in the sixties and seventies. He has often commented on the craft of writing, but one of his most unique and interesting techniques is his plan for writing a book in three days. " As a bonus, this post also includes the Lester Dent Master Plot Formula: "Lester Dent was a hugely prolific writer of pulp fiction stories, and is particularly remembered for the Doc Savage tales, which he created and wrote the great bulk of. His masterplan is a blueprint for classic pulp fiction stories, and it retains a lot of power, even today."
- Pipino: Gentleman Thief - The true story of art thief Vincenzo Pipino of Venice: ”Pipino had a simple philosophy: Aristocrats liked to flaunt their wealth; thieves liked to take it. Sometimes the burglar took something important and aristocrats would pay to get the item back. Pipino had heard that some palazzo owners took it as a badge of honor that he had slipped through their windows because it confirmed their good taste… Usually, the police negotiated “an arrangement” to get the works back. As Pipino saw it, everybody won. The police got to look like heroes, the bourgeois could brag that they’d been robbed by a famous thief, and Pipino made a living.”
- The amazing old Paramount Records ads that inspired R. Crumb - "The story of Paramount Records is a fascinating one… What concerns us here are the label’s print ads, which ran in The Chicago Defender. I’ve tried mightily to find the names of the artists who drew these. People in a better position to know than I assure me their identities are lost to the years, though they may have been staff illustrators at a Madison ad agency. The loss of that knowledge is a damned shame, because without knowing it, those artists altered the history of underground comix, by serving as an acknowledged influence on that form’s grand pooh-bah, Robert Crumb.” I don’t know if these ads really influenced Crumb, but they look great
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