Almost recovered from the Christmas Do. Roll on next year!
Happy invoicing!
- Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace - Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica (among other things), explores the life and work of Ada Lovelace, who was born 200 years ago last Thursday: ”Historians disagree. The personalities in the story are hard to read. The technology is difficult to understand… But after quite a bit of research—including going to see many original documents—I feel like I’ve finally gotten to know Ada Lovelace, and gotten a grasp on her story. In some ways it’s an ennobling and inspiring story; in some ways it’s frustrating and tragic.” Bonus Ada-related stuff: Sydney Padua, creator of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, has links to videos of the talks from last week’s symposium on Ada organised by the Bodleian Library. (And autocorrect just changed “Bodleian” to “Boolean”… we still have some way to go.)
- Fun with Killer Asteroids - David S. F. Portree on big rocks plummeting from the heavens: "Any time an asteroid is due to pass Earth – even if it will pass more than a million kilometers away – the popular-audience space media kicks into inaccuracy overdrive. Adjectives I heard used to describe 2004 BL86 included "giant," "huge," "mountain-sized," and "dangerous." Phrases used to describe its minimum-approach distance included "so close you’ll be able to see it," "very close," and "a close encounter." None of this language was accurate."
- Put The Girl in Danger! - The remarkable stuntwomen of early Hollywood: ”A report on injuries among thirty-seven movie companies from 1918 to 1919 stated, “Temporary injuries amounted to 1,052. Permanent ones totaled eighteen. There were three fatal injuries.” The report called this “a surprisingly low rate of accidents, considering the risk.” But more than a thousand injuries a year does not reflect a safe or trouble-free profession.”
- If There's MI5 & MI6, What Are MI1 to MI4? - ”The different branches of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (of which MI6 is the sixth department, obviously) started out as different spying departments in World War II, before eventually being closed on the grounds that World War II isn’t happening any more.” Slightly misleading title, as they have at certain times gone all the way to MI17. Or at least that’s what they want us to believe…
- A Brief History of People Getting Fired for Social Media Stupidity - Rolling Stone rounds up the most idiotic and offensive things people have posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and been fired for: ”Bigotry expressed in private is inexcusable, but bigotry voluntarily scribbled upon the un-erasable blackboard that is the Internet is a new kind of unbelievable. It boggles the mind that people will actually document and broadcast their terrible ideas online – especially given the documented and broadcast history of people getting fired over similar behavior. And yet, they do.”
- What Kind of Person Calls a Mass Shooting a Hoax? - "Sandy Hook father Lenny Pozner is one of too many parents painfully familiar with the answer. Dogged by a relentless conspiracy theorist, he's spent the past three years fighting to protect the honor of his murdered son." That last lot are bad, but these people who accuse grieving families of being actors in a government conspiracy are utterly disgusting.
- George W. Bush is smarter than you - Keith Hennessey, who was economics advisor to Dubya, on the former president’s intellectual abilities: ”President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.”
- Jury Duty - An anonymous juror recounts his experience in a US murder trial: ”There’s a handwritten confession that the defendant claims he didn’t write. He says he signed a blank page that appeared later containing a confession… I suppose this is why every black man was eliminated from the jury pool. If it’s biased to presuppose police officers are corrupt, it should be considered equally biased to presuppose that they always act lawfully. Instead, it’s considered ridiculous.”
- What It’s Like to Be Profoundly Face-Blind - Alexa Tsoulis-Reay interviews a woman with prosopagnosia: ”It doesn’t matter if I know the person: I’ve walked right past my husband, my own mother, my daughter, my son, without being able to recognize them… I once had to drop a sociology class, because I told the professor, to her face, that she was a horrible lecturer. I thought I was complaining to a fellow student!” Bonus linky: an online test of how good you are at recognising famous people. Your final score is calculated taking into account those you wouldn’t know because you’ve never heard of them. I got 62%
- Ghost Streets of Los Angeles - "I found myself looking at a lot of aerial shots of Los Angeles—specifically the area between West Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard—when I noticed this weird diagonal line cutting through the neighborhood… I love the idea that the buildings seen here take their form from a lost street—that an old throughway since scrubbed from the surface of Los Angeles has reappeared in the form of contemporary architectural space. That is, someone's living room is actually shaped the way it is not because of something peculiar to architectural history, but because of a ghost street, or the wall of perhaps your very own bedroom takes its angle from a right of way that, for whatever reason, long ago disappeared.”
Happy invoicing!
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