Coming up to the end of the sprint and I have nothing left to do, so I'm reading about conspiracies on the original WikiWikiWeb 
Happy invoicing!
- Confessions of a Tabloid 'Extremist' - Interview with Graham Johnson, a former tabloid journalist who was convicted for phone hacking at the NotW: ”It’s British press culture. I’ve been to a lot of countries as a reporter. Other reporters in other countries are very well behaved, and very nice – they don’t have any good stories, mind you!”
- Test drive of a petrol car - The Tesla Club of Sweden review a petrol car in the style of an electric car review: ”Having heard so much good about petrol cars, we decided to test drive one. They are said to combine cheap price with long range and fast charging… One could hear the engine’s sound and the car’s whole body vibrated as if something was broken, but the seller assured us that everything was as it should.”
- The man who windsurfed to work via River Thames - "Alex Allan was involved in a rather unusual episode in the 1980s. In order to get around a train strike, the intrepid Grateful Dead fanatic decided to windsurf to work wearing a bowler hat and suit and carrying a briefcase and an umbrella." I remember seeing him on the news
- Hooked and Booked: A brief look at bibliomania - "Some people think that collecting old books is a kind of mild insanity. The collector, on his side, smiles upon the ignorant who cannot understand the enjoyment of collecting… With development of bibliomania, the friendly, warming flame of a hobby become devastating, ravaging wildfire, a tempest of loosened and vehement passions. We are then in the presence of a pathological, irresistible mental compulsion, which has produced more than one crime interesting enough to be remembered.” Which reminds me, I need to take a week off to construct some bookcases…
- The Man Who Drank Cholera and Launched the Yogurt Craze - The story of Ilya Metchnikoff, Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist whose research inspired the probiotics industry: ”During the 1892 cholera epidemic in France, he drank Cholera vibrio, a bacteria that causes the disease… The cholera drink didn’t sicken Metchnikoff, so he let a volunteer from his lab repeat the test. When the first volunteer didn’t contract cholera either, Metchnikoff didn’t hesitate to accept an offer from a second one. To his horror, the young man fell ill and nearly died.”
- The impaled cranium that allegedly belonged to a 14th century pirate - Klaus Störtebeker was a pirate in the Baltic and the North Sea, until he was captured and executed: ”He decided to make a deal with the headsman. After he was decapitated the executioner was to allow his headless body to walk past his fellow pirates and release every man he was able to walk past. Störtebeker’s body was able to make it by 11 men before the executioner tripped him.”
- Fired Up: The Science of Flames - A look at the various polymers that help to reduce the dangers of fire in motor racing: ”Two fears you have as a race car driver: one is being on fire and two is being T-boned in the driver door – everything else you sort of accept.”
- lol my thesis - In which academics attempt to describe their research in a single sentence more trenchant, and possibly more honest, than their thesis title. For example, ”Environmental choice in a top invertebrate predator: understanding how behavior and ecology drive organism response to ecosystem change” becomes ”Octopuses do, or don’t do, things.”
- Using millions of online photos cobbled together, we can now watch history unfold - ”Computer scientists have now figured out how to create timelapses by pulling data from photos that people share publicly on sites like Flickr and Picasa. They call it timelapse mining.”
- Old cannon re-used as bollards - Martin H. Evans on the phenomenon of cannon being repurposed as street furniture:
Happy invoicing!
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