Meeting this morning full of "That'll be available in two weeks", "It's scheduled for September", and so on. Felt good knowing that means I won't be around for any of it 
Happy invoicing!
- A Black Cat in a Dark Room - Sarah A. Topol visits the Kazakh community where, for five years, many have been afflicted by a mysterious sleeping sickness: ”The residents of Kalachi and Krasnogorsk started getting sick en masse. It came like a biblical plague exacting revenge on all those people who had tutted poor Lyuba, poor Nadezhda, poor Julia. There would be nine waves of sleeping sickness in total — no street would be spared — over 130 people, a quarter of the total population, some multiple times. Everyone would exhibit similar symptoms: the slurred speech, the swaying, and the double vision. When they woke up, they remembered nothing.”
- I once tried to cheat sleep, and for a year I succeeded - Speaking of sleep, Akshat Rathi decided not to bother with it: ”With looming deadlines and an upcoming thesis defense, I was determined to find more hours to fit in work and study. The answer came from reading about the famous American inventor Buckminster Fuller, who, Time reported in 1943, spent two years sleeping only two hours a day.”
- The torture centre: Northern Ireland’s ‘hooded men’ - More sleep deprivation, this time courtesy of the British government: ”But the building that was erected that spring on the British army site at the old second World War airfield at Ballykelly, in Co Derry, was far less conspicuous… More than 1,000 people would be interned, but just 14 men would be brought to the secret compound in Ballykelly. They did not see it, for they were hooded, and they did not know for many years where they had been.”
- New Found Sounds - Rhodri Marsden on the resurgence of interest in analogue sound synthesis: ”The word synthesiser is taken from the Greek word for composition; it should be synonymous with invention, creation, exploration… In all the exhibited photographs of pre-synth pioneers at work in the studio, manipulating tape, primitive electronics and home-made effects, there’s an intensity and pleasure on their faces which stands in stark contrast to my own expression as I scroll wearily through presets in my own home studio. Something has evidently been lost. I want that spirit of discovery back; that feeling of excitement about what electronic sound can do.”
- How to shake someone who's tailing you - "You never know when you might be followed. This is how to lose that nefarious character that's hot on your heels." Handy
- The City So Nice They Walked It Twice - ”A few years ago, William Helmreich, a sociology professor at CUNY, wrote a book called “The New York Nobody Knows.” Helmreich had spent four years walking every block in the five boroughs—that’s a hundred and twenty thousand blocks and six thousand miles… I was, therefore, amazed to learn that there was another person walking the five boroughs: a thirty-something man named Matt Green. Green isn’t a sociologist; he’s more like an inexhaustibly curious visitor. He, too, has walked more than six thousand miles within the city limits.” Joshua Rothman introduced the two, which led to this short film.
- San Francisco introduces pee-repelling walls to reward public urinators with golden showers - HT to Alias for this one: ”To combat public urinators, SF’s Department of Public Works has announced that it has coated nine different walls around the city with hydrophobic paint so those who pee on said wall will get a taste of their own golden shower.” More on the story at one of the local papers: Pee on these S.F. walls? Be prepared for them to pee back
- An Unexpected Journey of Passion (Part 1) - Den Richards on his early days as a developer: ”Debugging was a painful series of replacing suspect wires with proven ones until that avenue had been exhausted. Then you called the IBM Customer Engineer and watched him diagnose internal machine components with the latest (very cool) analog test equipment. But in the end, he operated on the beast with screwdriver and pliers, and never left until the job was done.”
- He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died - "I came across a slightly mysterious website -- a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There's no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from… Who was this man? How did his photos end up on the web? I went on a two-day hunt, examined the source code of the website, and tried various Google tricks. Finally my investigation turned up the photographer as Jamie Livingston, and he did indeed take a photo every day for eighteen years, until the day he died, using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. He called the project "Photo of the Day" and presumably planned to collect them at some point - had he lived. He died on October 25, 1997 - his 41st birthday.”
- Underwater graveyard full of WWII planes is otherworldly - Photos by Brandi Mueller: ”The planes didn't actually crash at this particular location near the Marshall Islands, though. They were discarded there after WWII because it was too expensive to transport them back to the United States from the Kwajalein Atoll… The site includes Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers, F4U Corsairs, TBF/TBM Avengers, Helldivers, B-25 Mitchells, Curtiss C-46 Commandos and F4F Wildcats, which sit in the sand about 130 feet below the surface."
Happy invoicing!
