The cleaner is approaching: might as well post these while she vacuums under my desk 
Happy invoicing!
- A New Origin Story for Dogs - "Tens of thousands of years ago, before the internet, before the Industrial Revolution, before literature and mathematics, bronze and iron, before the advent of agriculture, early humans formed an unlikely partnership with another animal—the grey wolf. The fates of our two species became braided together. The wolves changed in body and temperament… They turned into dogs.” But now, geneticist Greger Larson has found evidence in ancient dog DNA from Ireland that suggests wolves may have been domesticated twice, in the West and independently in the East.
- How World War II scientists invented a data-driven approach to fighting fascism - ”One of the earliest personality tests was developed during World War II to determine who might become an authoritarian and join the Nazi movement… The researchers wanted to understand why some people are seduced by political figures like Adolf Hitler, and they had a very idealistic plan to improve education so that young people would become more skeptical of Hitler's us-or-them politics.” Unsurprisingly, those drawn to authoritarianism tend to also be very conservative.
- Working on Fable destroyed my life, but I don't regret it - Ian Denniston on the nightmare of crunch mode in a game studio: ”At the time it all seemed pretty reasonable. Then annual leave was canceled and longer days became the norm. It would be more than a year before it would end… Although the day-to-day aspects would be familiar to most crunch scenarios, it was the total length and the complete burnout that was so different. A couple of months crunch was to be expected; several months would be less usual, but common. For it to go on for as long and as relentlessly as it did with Fable was all but unheard of.”
- How To Let Go - Rhian Sasseen on the joys of falling: ”For a brief span of about one spring, I was obsessed with learning how to fall. This is not a metaphor; when I say I was learning, I mean that I typed “how to fall” into a search engine and discovered the surprisingly robust world of YouTube falling tutorials… The idea of context, of falling for a greater purpose — a stunt or a laugh or some other kind of performance — for some reason, this depressed me. My interest stemmed from something more ephemeral; I practiced in my bedroom, refusing to let anybody watch.” It’s good to have a hobby, I suppose
- Ashgabat: the city of the living and the city of the dead - Fascinating photo-essay by Ilya Varlamov in the capital of Turkmenistan, where pristine buildings constructed on a grand scale remain empty and unused: ”’Where are all the people?’ – this question often arises when people see photos of the white-marbled capital of Turkmenistan. Indeed, new Ashgabat looks empty. Huge new buildings lined with marble, wide avenues, parks, gardens, fountains are all there, but there are no people in the city.”
- How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus - "In Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg built not just a business, but a company culture with the fervor of a messianic sect. So, in June 2011, when Google launched Google Plus, Zuckerberg put his company into lockdown." The weird thing about the attitudes of the Facebook employees is that they don’t realise how weird their attitudes are.
- Aristolochia clematitis, birthwort: How the Extent of Aristolochia Poisoning Came to be Known - You have to scroll down a little to the relevant section of this page about a plant which is now believed to be the primary cause of a mysterious pattern of kidney disorders across certain regions of the Balkans, with part of the mystery being explained when a doctor observed two women exchange a greeting in a clinic in Belgium: ”Just after the end of World War II, family doctors in north-west Bulgaria noted a high incidence of kidney disease but only in some areas. In 1956, a study of 664 patients was published noting that the disease formed clusters in villages, families and, sometimes, single households… Following two international conferences in the mid-1960s, the condition was designated as Balkan endemic nephropathy (BEN).” I first read about BEN in the book The Ghost Disease in the 1980s, when it was given as an example of a disorder whose aetiology continued to baffle medicine; it’s interesting to see that the cause has now, probably, been determined.
- Combat Juggling - "In the image above, there are two men who are juggling. That’s pretty clear. What’s less clear? They’re engaged in a duel — fighting each other in ways that jugglers rarely do. And only one juggler will prevail." Dan Lewis tells you all you need to know about one of the more recondite organised sports.
- A guy trained a machine to "watch" Blade Runner. Then things got seriously sci-fi. - A peculiar business behind a copyright infringement case: ”Warner Bros. had just made a fascinating mistake. Some of the Blade Runner footage — which Warner has since reinstated — wasn't actually Blade Runner footage. Or, rather, it was, but not in any form the world had ever seen… Warner had just DMCA'd an artificial reconstruction of a film about artificial intelligence being indistinguishable from humans, because it couldn't distinguish between the simulation and the real thing.”
- The Night Streets of Tokyo, Captured 'Blade Runner'-Style - Continuing the Blade Runner theme, Liam Wong’s photographs are not stills from the film, no matter how much they look like it:
Happy invoicing!
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