Actually got interesting stuff to work on today. Makes a nice change 
Happy invoicing!
- Sonic Sabotage: The Noisy History Of Auto-Destructive Music - "Sub Pop recently issued a deluxe version of Father John Misty's album featuring a "bulging thickness" in the packaging that warped the vinyl beyond repair. But, says Robert Barry, this is just the latest in a rich history of self-destroying art.” I particularly like the piece for cello that requires the use of a saw in place of a bow
- Life on Mars Part I: A Firm in a Firm, Life on Mars Part II: The Dirty Squad - Interesting details about Met Police corruption in the 1960s - 1970s: ”The “firm in a firm” provided whatever service was required. It could get criminal charges dropped against the guilty or ensue their acquittal. It could secure the conviction of men who did not pay bribes or got in the way of bigger fish who were paying. It could protect bribe-paying gangs by preventing their detection. It could even supply the direct participation of some policemen in serious crimes such as robbery.”
- The Bomb in the Bag - "A New York City stockbroker named M. Leopold was working in his office at 84 Broadway shortly after noon on December 4, 1891, when he sensed vibrations, an odd rumbling. Looking outside, he saw flames and a cloud of smoke shooting out from a window of the Arcade Building directly across the street. A man’s body then flew out through the opening, landing on Broadway. Leopold raised his window and smelled the tang of dynamite." Jack El-Hai on America’s first suicide bomber.
- The Failed Attempt to Destroy GPS - "On May 10, 1992, the activists Keith Kjoller and Peter Lumsdaine snuck into a Rockwell International facility in Seal Beach, California. They used wood-splitting axes to break into two clean rooms containing nine satellites being built for the U.S. government. Lumsdaine took his axe to one of the satellites, hitting it over 60 times." Ingrid Burrington on the people who wanted to stop GPS, partly inspired by the message of the Terminator movies.
- Security: Toddler vs Phone Lock - Michael Hendricks finds that modern device security simply can’t stand up to a determined five year old: ”My fourth child, Gideon, recently turned five so he's in his prime for exploiting security vulnerabilities. For example, he recently discovered a denial of service attack on our Chromebook which allows him to delete all of his siblings' accounts from the laptop. He repeatedly accessed a disabled Guest account on his brother's tablet before we found a way to close that attack vector completely.”
- Small Child in Woods - "In 1987, an anonymous team of computer scientists from the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic wrote a series of children's books based on the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series. The books were hastily translated into English and a small number were exported to America, but the CIA, fearing a possible Soviet mind control scheme, confiscated them all before they could be sold. Now declassified, the books have been lovingly converted to a digital hypertext format and put online for the English-speaking world to enjoy. What follows is the first book in the "You Will Select a Decision" series.”
- My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online - A look inside the sausage factory by James King: ”The Mail's editorial model depends on little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication… what DailyMail.com does goes beyond anything practiced by anything else calling itself a newspaper.” In response, the Mail have denied his allegations and sought to discredit him personally. As far as I’m aware, they still haven’t responded to the Planetary Society’s complaint from last year, about them stealing astrophysicist Katherine Mack’s work: Daily Mail plagiarizes Planetary Society Blog guest post by Katherine Mack. And, as Emily Lakdwalla points out, ”Just do a Google search on "Daily Mail plagiarism" to find countless victims."
- How I Used EVE Online to Predict the Great Recession - Ramin Shokrizade found parallels between the online game’s economic models and the activities of real-life financial institutions: ”Back in 2003 when I was helping CCP with their new economy in EVE Online, the biggest problem with their design was that the factories that were central to the player based economy were too cheap to buy and maintain…. When I began creating virtual economic systems and theories in 2005, I looked to the way our “real” economies were designed to see if I could find parallel systems.”
- Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest - "An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture’s lost city, never before explored. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied “White City,” also referred to in legend as the “City of the Monkey God.”"
- B4-XVI beforesixteen - "Highlighting an invisible conversation between hip hop and art before the 16th century."
Left: The Adoration of the Magi. Hugo van der Goes. Netherlandish. Late 15th century. Right: Wiz Khalifa
Happy invoicing!
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