Once upon a time, I thought I'd post some links to provide a little distraction for those going back to their clients after the Christmas/New Year break. Just a one-off thing. Six years later, here we are 
Happy invoicing!
- The best (or worst) news media corrections of 2015 - Robert Rector rounds up some of the more interesting corrections published by the world press during last year, such as a simple misidentification by the Prague Post:”Last week’s column mistakenly misidentified a source. The European Commission president is Romano Prodi, not Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
- The Gorgeous Rocks Only Found in Car Factories - "Before car factories were fully automated, workers sprayed vehicles with paint by hand. It was a messy process. And over time, misses and thick coats would drip from the cars and pool where the cars went to dry. As the cars baked, so did the paint runoff. The drier was a stand in for the oppressive temperatures and pressures of the Earth’s inner layers, and soon the pooled paint was rock-solid. When factory workers eventually cleaned the painting stations, this synthetic lasagna of paint broke apart to reveal beautiful, layered “stones” that could be polished to a fine shine. Named after the places it was made, “Fordite,” or “Detroit agate,” was born."
- Dear Architects: Sound Matters - I don’t often link to the NYT these days because of its increasingly irritating paywall, but it’s near the start of the month when it resets, and this interactive feature by Michael Kimmelman on how sound affects our experience of a space is worth it. ”We talk about how cities and buildings look. We call places landmarks or eyesores. But we rarely talk about how architecture sounds, aside from when a building or room is noisy.” It uses 3D audio which needs headphones, to the relief of those sitting around you who might otherwise be perturbed by the sound of an underground train arriving in your cubicle.
- Bedford and the Normalization of Deviance - That’s Bedford, Ma., and deviance from best practise. In this case, an experienced flight crew attempted to take off with the gust lock, which prevents an aircraft’s control surfaces being blown about by the wind when it’s parked, still engaged. Unable to control the plane, they crashed off the end of the runway. And the reasons included the fact that, as on 98% of their previous takeoffs, they didn’t complete any of the required checklists. ”This wasn’t a normal accident chain. The pilots knew what was wrong while there was still plenty of time to stop it. They had all the facts you and I have today. They chose to continue anyway. It’s the most inexplicable thing I’ve yet seen a professional pilot do, and I’ve seen a lot of crazy things. If locked flight controls don’t prompt a takeoff abort, nothing will.” You can also read the NTSB’s full report (PDF, 1.8MB).
- The Missing 11th of the Month - "On November 28th, 2012, Randall Munroe published an xkcd comic that was a calendar in which the size of each date was proportional to how often each date is referenced by its ordinal name (e.g. “October 14th”) in the Google Ngrams database since 2000… if you stare at the comic long enough, you may get the impression that the 11th of most months is unusually small. The title text of the comic concurs, reading “In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It’s been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.” After digging into the raw data, I believe I have figured out why." David R Hagen on an anomaly arising from OCR.
- Digital Sundial - Interesting project for those of you who got a 3D printer for Christmas, by Thingiverse user Mojoptix: a sundial whose gnomon is carefully designed to project the time in Arabic numerals to a twenty minute resolution: ”No batteries, no motor, no electronics... It's all just a really super-fancy shadow show. The shape of the sundial has been mathematically designed to only let through the right sunrays at the right time/angle. This allows to display the actual time with sunlit digits inside the sundial's shadow.”
- Messages from the Sea - New project by Paul Brown: ”Messages from the Sea is a collection of letters and notes from a lost era of seafaring. These messages were found washed ashore on beaches and bobbing in water, in corked glass bottles and wax-sealed boxes, inside the mouths of codfish and in the bellies of sharks, carved on pieces of wrecked ships and attached to the necks of seabirds. They tell tales of foundering ships, missing ocean liners and shipwrecked sailors, and contain moving farewells, romantic declarations and intriguing confessions. Some solve the mysteries of lost vessels and crews, while others create new mysteries yet to be solved.” One to add to your feeds, unless I’m the only person left who still uses them. ”Found 6 January 1907, on the shore near Ulverston, Cumbria. In a stout bottle, on a piece of ordinary envelope: ’Finder please give this to relatives of Bertha Magnussam, Wavertree, Liverpool, England. Love from Hubert, and good-bye.’”
- Of Oz the Wizard - From the “because I can” department (or possibly the “too much free time” department), here’s The Wizard of Oz edited to put all the dialogue into alphabetical order. It’s a bit choppy at first, as “a” is quite a short word and appears a lot. The famous sequence where the tornado carries Dorothy into Oz, being dialogue-free, is one of the few (perhaps the only) complete scenes; it starts with “aaiee” if you want to find it
- In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why? - Geoff Micks addresses this important question: ”Someone beat me to the obvious answer that a final showdown would see Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt doing a dagger-wielding version of a Mexican standoff, so I took it too far and walked through how I thought every president would turn out. An hour later the result greatly exceeded the maximum 10,000 character limit for a [Reddit] post, so I’ve decided to blog about it instead.”
- Forensic Facial Reconstruction Of The Crystal Head Vodka Bottle Is Badass - If you’ve got one of these expensive skull=shaped vodka bottles, you can now find out that it looked like when it still had flesh: ”How could you not love a glass skull filled with Vodka? A forensic artist from Scotland named Nigel, decided to put his skills to the test and apply facial reconstruction to the good old skull of vodka. Turns out the skull looks like a pretty happy guy. I mean, his head is filled with vodka. How could you not be happy?”
Happy invoicing!
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