Another busy day here on the flood plain, but at least it's fairly sunny 
Happy invoicing!
- What Would Happen If All Our Satellites Were Suddenly Destroyed? - "The idea that all the satellites — or at least good portion of them — could be rendered inoperable is not as outlandish as it might seem at first. There are at least three plausible scenarios in which this could happen." And bad things follow
- A Peek at the Golden Age of Prison Radio - "In 1938, as the Great Depression was winding down, a Texas radio station began airing “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls,” a variety show broadcast every Wednesday night from the state prison in Huntsville… At one point, it had five million listeners, who sent in as many as a 100,000 fan letters each year. Executions were stayed so that they would not conflict with the show, which was performed in an auditorium 50 yards from Old Sparky, the state’s electric chair.” Sounds like it was pretty good for everyone, but I don’t suppose they’re likely to bring it back.
- The Inventor of Customer Satisfaction Surveys Is Sick of Them, Too - "Fourteen years ago, an executive at Bain & Co had a suggestion -- create a short consumer survey to test brand loyalty. The idea took off, so much so that the executive, Fred Reichheld, has watched it morph into a Frankenstein: the endless loop of “brief” satisfaction surveys following a dental appointment, car rental or salad at a corner restaurant." It didn’t happen to me, but I bet somebody goes to read this and gets a “Will you take our survey?” popup
- How we caught a black hole emitting intense wind - Nothing to do with the various protagonists of the EU referendum debate: ”After monitoring a fairly quiet black hole for nearly 26 years, my colleagues and I were thrilled to suddenly catch it emit a powerful wind – something we didn’t even know black holes could do.”
- Does City Life Pose a Risk to Mental Health? - "Researchers first suggested in the 1930s that urban living might increase schizophrenia risk. Since then many large epidemiological studies have reported an association between the two… Converging evidence has revealed that growing up in the city doubles the risk of developing psychosis later in life.” That explains a lot about some of the estates round here.
- This 1916 Guide Shows What the First Road Trips Were Like - If you thought driving could be a pain now, consider what it was like back then: ”A trip from, say, Chicago to Denver, would involve hundreds of turns on small local roads that wound their way through the countryside and zig-zagged through towns… Following these directions would require two things: a good odometer and a degree of diligence. If you got off track all your numbers would be off. You’d have to find your way back to the nearest point of reference.”
- The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster - Could a British physicist have explained how the EmDrive could produce thrust without violating the principle of Conservation of Momentum? ”McCulloch’s idea is that inertia arises from an effect predicted by general relativity called Unruh radiation… At very small accelerations, the wavelengths become so large they can no longer fit in the observable universe. When this happens, inertia can take only certain whole-wavelength values and so jumps from one value to the next. In other words, inertia must quantized at small accelerations.”
- How Music Taste Evolved - You’ll need headphones, or speakers and nobody else around, for this. Choose a date between 1958 and 2015 and it will proceed to play snippets of the songs that topped the Billboard charts from that time onwards - the longer the song was in the charts, the more of it you hear, whereas one-week-wonders barely get as much as a second. It can get a bit cacophonous, but it’s a way of hearing how music has developed over the years
- How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist - Tristan Harris explains how the understanding of psychology deployed by magicians can be used to inform decisions made in the implementation of technology: ”Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano. And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.”
- Guns replaced with Selfie Sticks - Your favourite movies, updated to reflect modern narcissism (BTW, why isn’t it called a NarcissiStick?)
Happy invoicing!
