Raining out? Don't bother going out for lunch, and feed your head with this lot instead 
Happy invoicing!
- The Marvellous Analytical Engine- How It Works - Sydney Padua, creator of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (now available in book form, and which I highly recommend), puts her animation skills to even better use than her day job of making monsters in movies, with these visualisations of the various components of Babbage’s Analytical Engine: ”It had programs, memory, cycles, loops, and all sorts of computery things despite being constructed entirely out of brass gears and powered by a steam engine… Eventually I had to build my own, meta-fashion, in computer-generated form; where I found out that it’s not only a delightfully beautiful machine jam-packed with ingenious devices, it’s also considerably easier to understand than a modern computer.”
- Library of Babel - Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the Library of Babel: ”The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors… There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious.” Now, Jonathan Basile has implemented this world of almost infinitely many, random volumes. More remarkable: it’s searchable. I have no idea how that is done in real time, as each of the approximately 10^4677 books is only generated when somebody looks at, or perhaps for, it…
- The Untold Story of Silk Road Part, Part 1, Part 2: The Fall - The story of Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, aka DPR, who last week was jailed for life for his creation and operation of the Silk Road marketplace: ”Facing a new year and a blank slate, Ross had resolved to change his life. ‘In 2011,’ he wrote to himself, ‘I am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before. Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator.’”
- Allen Ginsberg, LSD poetry and sacrificing chickens: the birth of the ’60s hippie underground revealed - Last Saturday was the 50th anniversary of the International Poetry Incarnation: ”Allen Ginsberg and an anarchic gang of poets staged a happening at London’s Royal Albert Hall. There were breakdowns, bad trips, ‘incredible barbaric colour’, giant orgasmic sneezes – and the first public sighting of the new counterculture which would soon revolutionise rock’n’roll. ‘That night,’ says one survivor, ‘we realised society was changing…’”
- Everyday Life and Fatal Hazard in Sixteenth-Century England - A research project at Oxford University: ”The objective of the project is to investigate accidental death in its social context in sixteenth-century England through the coroners’ reports filed in the records of the court of King’s Bench. The project aims to document the nature of hazard and risk across the nation in Tudor England and to use this to draw a picture of everyday life.” For example: "On 12 February 1543 [Elizabeth Bowne] was sitting by the fire in the kitchen of her master’s house, warming herself, when the rope suspending four flitches of bacon to smoke in the chimney broke. The bacon fell on her, knocked her to the ground and crushed her head and body; she died four days later."
- My Mom Has a Question - Dave Pell goes with his parents to the Holocaust Museum, where they meet the museum’s historians and executives: ”Nearly eight decades after a friend told her in her backyard that they couldn’t be friends anymore because my mom was Jewish, after hearing the crunch of breaking glass under her shoes the morning after Kristallnacht, after a Sophie’s Choice moment that sent her and her sister on a train with a fake passport, after years in an ever-threatened children’s home (they wouldn’t call it an orphanage even though they knew that’s what it was)… after decades of working with professors to develop courses on the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition and anything else that could provide a clue to the answer she sought; she still had a question.”
- Six reasons the blanket octopus is my new favorite cephalopod - "When I first saw a picture of the blanket octopus I did a double take. I’d never heard of a blanket octopus before, which is surprising given the internet’s obsession with both large cephalopods and bizarre animals. A two meter long octopus dressed like a fashion icon certainly falls under both categories. But the truth is, blanket octopuses are incredibly elusive. Very few videos exist, and not much is known about their biology. To help spread the word on these lovely creatures, here are six reasons why blanket octopuses are my new favorite cephalopods."
- The Strange Story of Bob Dylan’s Triumphant First Letterman Performance - Matthew Giles on a great performance from 1984: ”His backing musicians that night didn’t include any members of his old running buddies the Band, or high-profile hired hands like ex–Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor or Dire Straits' front man Mark Knopfler, who’d both worked with him during that period. Nor was he joined by any of his old Greenwich Village cronies. Instead, standing behind Dylan, all dressed in ratty black suits, were three unknown 20-somethings — and they were killing it.”
- Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?” - An essay Asimov wrote in 1959 for a nuclear research project, on creativity, which was recently rediscovered by erstwhile colleague Arthur Obermayer: ”This essay was never published or used beyond our small group. When I recently rediscovered it while cleaning out some old files, I recognized that its contents are as broadly relevant today as when he wrote it. It describes not only the creative process and the nature of creative people but also the kind of environment that promotes creativity.”
- London Streets In The 1980s - Great photos: ”The mid 1980s are only 30 years ago but walking along London’s streets today I still find it surprising how considerable the change has been in many areas. For this week’s post, I would like to take you back through a snapshot of London Streets in the 1980s, with some of the photos we took, mainly of south, east and north London."
Happy invoicing!
