Quite nice out there today, but don't worry, you can ignore that and stay in reading this lot instead 
Happy invoicing!
- How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell - "An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem… For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.” Apparently people don’t realise that mapping IP addresses to physical locations is an unreliable science at best.
- An Engineering Disaster on Edge of L.A. Offers an Ominous Warning - "Eighty-eight years ago, the St. Francis Dam burst in the middle of a March night, killing nearly 500 people. There are some images of the aftermath, but numbers tell the story better: 12.4 billion gallons of water rising to the furious height of 140 feet, surging 54 miles to the Pacific Ocean, an inland tsunami 2 miles wide leveling towns in its path." And now engineers are saying that the US’s large dams are all falling to bits
:
- Mimic Octopuses, Thaumoctopus mimicus - "This fascinating creature was discovered in 1998 off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia on the bottom of a muddy river mouth. For the next 2 years, scientists filmed nine different mimic octopuses, Thaumoctopus mimicus (Norman & Hochberg, 2005), impersonating sea snakes, lionfish, and flatfish—a strategy used to avoid predators."
- Spies in the Skies - "America is being watched from above. Government surveillance planes routinely circle over most major cities — but usually take the weekends off." Analysis of data from Flightradar24 reveals the FBI and DHS flights that are definitely not any kind of mass surveillance, oh no, not at all, honestly. (Similar flight patterns have been observed over London, involving aircraft believed to be linked to the Met Police and the security services.)
- Kitchen Revolt at The Savoy: 16 fiery cooks took their long knives - "On 8 March 1898, The Star (London) wrote: ‘During the last 24-hours The Savoy Hotel has been the scene of disturbances which in a South American Republic would be dignified by the name of revolution. Three managers have been dismissed and 16 fiery French and Swiss cooks (some of them took their long knives and placed themselves in a position of defiance) have been bundled out by the aid of a strong force of Metropolitan police.’ It took an entire day – during which the hotel was guarded by a strong police force – until the situation was under control." The strange story of how César Ritz and Auguste Escoffier refused to go quietly when sacked for fiddling.
- Things My Male Tech Colleagues Have Actually Said to Me, Annotated - Cate Burlington lists some of the moronic crap she has to put up with from blokes, with her responses: ”’How did you learn to do all this?!’ The ancient Spider-Goddess Llorothaag came to me in a harrowing blood-soaked vision. In exchange for perpetual servitude as her handmaiden, she imparted knowledge of IP subnetting.”
- One Man Against Tyranny - "A lone German carpenter displays astounding determination, skill and ingenuity—and comes within 8 minutes of assassinating Adolf Hitler at the outset of World War II. So why is Georg Elser's name so nearly forgotten?"
- The Deadly Consequences of Solitary With a Cellmate - The appalling conditions in some US prisons: ”Unlike many in solitary, Sesson and Simmons wouldn’t have a moment alone. The 4'8"-by-10'8" space was originally built for one, but as Menard became increasingly overcrowded and guards sent more people to solitary, the prison bolted in a second bunk. The two men would have to eat, sleep, and defecate inches from one another for nearly 24 hours a day in a space smaller than a parking spot, if a parking spot had walls made of cement and steel on all sides.”
- Averting the Blackout of the Century - "On a searing Thursday afternoon in September 2011, a technician reconfiguring circuits at an electrical switchyard near Yuma, Ariz., prematurely cranked open a hand-operated switch. This tiny misstep shorted out the Southwest Powerlink — a major electrical artery for the region and a key part of the entire Western grid — and sparked one of the biggest blackouts ever to strike North America." Just to add to the fun, it turns out that the more reliable you make the system, the bigger the collapse when things do go wrong
- Beer Coasters - Vladimir Gerlic has amassed an extensive collection of beer mats from all over Europe. I’m not sure quite how this beer from the Czech Republic got its name
Happy invoicing!
Comment