The rainfall radar's showing scattered showers almost everywhere (that's what scattering them does, after all), so you'd better stay inside and read this lot instead 
Happy invoicing!
- Netflix and Ch-Ch-Chilly - Rex Sorgatz returns to the tiny, remote town in the US’s deep MidWest where he grew up, to see how the Internet has changed life in such isolation for young people: ”Descriptions of Napoleon resemble a listless thesaurus recitation of the word remote, so I often resort to numbers to illustrate its lilliputian properties: zero stop lights, two bars, three gas stations, and four churches. The downtown of Napoleon stretches one block… Out on the prairie, pop culture existed only in the vaguest sense. Not only did I never hear the Talking Heads or Public Enemy or The Cure, I could never have heard of them. With a radio receiver only able to catch a couple FM stations, cranking out classic rock, AC/DC to Aerosmith, the music counterculture of the ’80s would have been a different universe to me.”
- Looting of the Fox: The Story of Sabotage at ShapeShift - Meanwhile, in other news about the Internet improving everybody’s lives: ”This is the story of how ShapeShift, a leading blockchain asset exchange platform, was betrayed. Not once, not twice, but three times in less than a month. In total, nearly two-hundred thousand dollars in cryptocurrency was stolen by thieves within and without, not to mention the significant resources expended in its wake.” Wave of the future, Jack
- Megaprocessor - James Newman is building a computer the old fashioned way: ” Like all modern processors the Megaprocessor is built from transistors. It's just that instead of using teeny-weeny ones integrated on a silicon chip it uses discrete individual ones… Computers are quite opaque, looking at them it's impossible to see how they work. What I would like to do is get inside and see what's going on. Trouble is we can't shrink down small enough to walk inside a silicon chip. But we can go the other way; we can build the thing big enough that we can walk inside it. Not only that we can also put LEDs on everything so we can actually SEE the data moving and the logic happening. It's going to be great.” A project for Zeity to inflict on the esteemed customers
- Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind - Blake Ross posted this last Friday, revealing that he has no mind’s eye with which to see things, and in fact thought all talk about visualisation was metaphorical until he realised that most other people could imagine things visually: ”I have never visualized anything in my entire life. I can’t “see” my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind.” One thing that intrigued me about the discussion of this article on Twitter over the weekend was that a couple of people I know in person, including one I’ve worked with, are the same as Blake; and their minds were equally blown when they realised that they were missing out on something. (One of them commented that his wife was now looking at him “like I’m broken”
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- Nine abandoned islands of Scotland - "Many of Scotland’s islands now lie uninhabited - save for birds, seals and the odd herd of goats - but they were once thriving communities often pushed out as progress took over. Here we look at nine islands that were left behind." Some beautiful places to get away from it all, if you don’t mind no plumbing or power and, I assume, terrible weather on a regular basis
- Squawking 7700—In-flight Emergencies from a Pilot’s Perspective and Squawking 7700—An Air Traffic Controller’s Perspective on In-flight Emergencies - Here’s what people do when your plane starts falling to bits mid-journey.
- Toronto used to have a cocktail bar in an old airplane - With a bit of luck, your plane will make it this far: ”For just under 10 years, the Trans-Canada Air Lines aircraft registration CF-CGE flew commercially across the Americas and Europe. A Lockheed Super Constellation built in Burbank, Calif., it could hold roughly 100 passengers and had a range of about 8,200 kms--roughly the distance between Toronto to Moscow… In 1996, the plane, minus its engines, was shipped to the Regal Constellation Hotel on Dixon Rd. near Pearson Airport to become a cocktail lounge, of all things.”
- Incredible 17th c. silk gown found in shipwreck - "In August of 2014, divers [from the Texel Diving Club in North Holland] discovered that artifacts from one known wreck, a well-armed merchant ship buried since it sank in the 17th century, had been exposed… It was only when the brought the bundle to the surface that they realized they’d recovered antique textiles." And they turned out to have been remarkable well-preserved under the Wadden Sea
- Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to 🍕? - Monica Dinculescu of Google explains how the various aspects of Unicode rendering come together in mankind’s greatest achievement since, I dunno, hieroglyphics: ”Each emoji has a design guideline and name, which is a description/suggestion of what the emoji should look like. This is why 💁,for example, often gets in trouble for being labelled as Information Desk Person, but is actually just a sassy lady: it’s the implementation of the emoji that doesn’t match its original description, not the other way around.”
- Classic Programmer Paintings - "Painters and Hackers: nothing in common whatsoever, but this is software engineering as depicted by artists through history."
Programmers at work maintaining a Ruby on Rails application
Eero Järnefelt,
Oil on canvas, 1893
Happy invoicing!
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