I forgot to do an introductory sentence like this one last week, but I don't suppose anybody pays much attention to them anyway, preferring to get straight on to the stuff below 
Happy invoicing!
- Into the Zombie Underworld - "I moved to Haiti in the spring of 2007, when my wife found a job with the United Nations' peacekeeping mission there… About a month after I arrived in Jérémie, a rumor swept through town that a deadly zombie was on the loose. This zombie, it was said, could kill by touch alone. The story had enough authority that schools closed. The head of the local secret society responsible for the management of the zombie population was asked to investigate. Later that week, Monsieur Roswald Val, having conducted a presumably thorough inquiry, made an announcement on Radio Lambi: There was nothing to fear; all his zombies were accounted for.” Mischa Berlinski brings a disturbing tale from Haiti, where rural life seems to be very different indeed from the home life of our own dear Queen
- Apple II DOS source code - "On April 10, 1978 Bob Shepardson and Steve Jobs signed a $13,000 one-page contract for a file manager, a BASIC interface, and utilities. It specified that “Delivery will be May 15″, which was incredibly aggressive. But, amazingly, “Apple II DOS version 3.1″ was released in June 1978. With thanks to Paul Laughton, in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Damer, founder and curator of the DigiBarn Computer Museum, and with the permission of Apple Inc., we are pleased to make available the 1978 source code of Apple II DOS for non-commercial use." HT to Zeity for this bit of history, from the days when a disk operating system would be written in a month
- Noma's taste of tomorrow: creating the future of food - Profile of the exclusive Copenhagen restaurant, and its vision for the future. ”Around 3pm, foragers who scour the coastline and woodland sourcing the seasonal products that are intrinsic to Noma's identity - scurvy grass, samphire, pea shoots, beach mustard, purslane, beach beets, sea arrowgrass - arrive carrying large plastic baskets that have been emptied in storage sheds downstairs… The herb garden fills the room with an earthy, organic smell.”
- Inside the wild—and wildly successful—early years of Mission Control - Eric Berger on a new book about the people on the ground who made NASA’s space missions work: ”Debriefings didn’t occur in a space center conference room, Fendell recalls in the book, but rather in the Hofbraugarten German restaurant about 10 miles away in Dickinson. ‘The only people who went to that party were the flight controllers and the astronauts—no one else,’ Fendell says in the book. ‘There was no ‘I’m bringing my girlfriend.’ You went down there, you drank beer, and everybody talked about you and they talked about all the tulip that you did wrong.’”
- Neglected Utopia - Photographer Laurent Kronental chronicles the architecturally remarkable, but now neglected, modernist housing estates of Paris.
- Reverse engineering ARM1 instruction sequencing, compared with the Z-80 and 6502 - Ken Shirriff: ”When a computer executes a machine language instruction, it breaks down the instruction into smaller steps that are performed in sequence. For instance, a load instruction might first compute a memory address, then fetch a value from that address, and then store that value in a register. This article describes how the ARM1 processor implements instruction sequencing, performing the right steps in order. I also look briefly at the 6502 and Z-80 microprocessors and the different sequencing techniques they use.”
- An Ingenious New Way of Solving Cold Cases - Inspired by the special pack of playing cards handed out to US troops in Iraq to help them identify members of Saddam’s regime, law enforcement agencies in a number of US states are distributing packs of cards featuring cold cases in prisons: ”The inmate had been playing with an unusual deck of cards he had purchased from commissary when he saw Comrie’s face—printed, along with the basic facts of his case, on the nine of clubs. Realizing he had once heard a fellow inmate talking about shooting Comrie, the tipster called the free hotline number that was printed along the bottom of the card and told the authorities what he knew. Last July, as a direct result of that phone call, Comrie’s killer was sentenced to 37 years in prison.”
- The Malware Museum - "The Malware Museum is a collection of malware programs, usually viruses, that were distributed in the 1980s and 1990s on home computers. Once they infected a system, they would sometimes show animation or messages that you had been infected. Through the use of emulations, and additionally removing any destructive routines within the viruses, this collection allows you to experience virus infection of decades ago with safety." HT to northernladuk for this excellent new Internet Archive collection, which allows you to run once-feared software in your browser.
- Inside Jobs - "The books and manuscripts were disappearing from a room no one seemed to be entering. Its doors were almost never opened, the room itself closed to public view. There was no believable explanation for where the materials might be going, so the least believable reasoning soon took hold. It was the work of the devil, the residents said. A poltergeist. A symbolic act of God meant to communicate something, if only they could interpret the signs." But in reality, the monastery library was being robbed by a more mundane entity: an engineer who had discovered a forgotten secret passage.
- DOCUMERICA: Images of America in Crisis in the 1970s - HT to Alias for this excellent gallery of photos: ”As the 1960s came to an end, the rapid development of the American postwar decades began to take a noticeable toll on the environment, and the public called for action. In November 1971, the newly created Environmental Protection Agency announced a massive photo documentary project, called DOCUMERICA, to record the adverse effects of modern life on the environment. More than 100 photographers were hired not only to document specific issues, but to capture images showing how we interacted with the environment. By 1974, more than 80,000 photographs had been produced.”
Happy invoicing!
Comment