The fire alarm went off at ClientCo earlier. Wish it would go off again; relaxing beneath the shade of the trees at the end of the car park is more pleasant than ditzing about with code on a day like this 
Bonus food linky: norrahe’s blog was two years old yesterday! Join in the celebrations with Sous vide pork cheek carnitas
Happy invoicing!
- “I’m the Dang Goat’s Pack Animal,” Says Man Walking Across America With Goat - Steve Wescott is walking across the USA to raise money for an orphanage in Kenya, in the company of a goat: “I met this goat and he was amazing,” says Wescott, “I thought, okay this is it. I’m taking this goat to Times Square.”
- The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol - The story of the protocol that, for a while, seemed as if it would beat the Web: ”It was plain text — no pictures, given that modem speeds were so slow. And it was organized like the one information source most people alive in the early 1990s were familiar with: a library, with similar subjects grouped together. You just pointed your gopher, as the lingo went, to any Gopher site you wanted to explore, and there you were, burrowing through the internet. It was so simple that just about anyone could make it work, even an English major.”
- London’s Lost Suspension Railway at Kings Cross - "A full twenty years before steam trains started arriving at the new station of King’s Cross, a small suspension railway had operated on the opposite side of the road. Not only was it an early form of suspension railway – it was also human powered – by a man spinning a wheel at the front of each carriage." Ian Mansfield uncovers another bit of London’s transport history.
- Generating fantasy maps - Interesting approach from Martin O'Leary: ”There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different.”
- The Media Learned Nothing After Misreporting the Reagan Assassination Attempt - "As the shooter John Hinckley returns to life outside of imprisonment, it’s worth looking back at every thing the media got wrong that day.” Which turns out to be most things, and in exactly the same ways they get things wrong today
- Stolen rubber duck returned to family after five years of travelling the world - "A jet-setting rubber duck is back home in Hampton, New Hampshire, but its travels and sudden return after five years are still a mystery. Stolen in 2011, the Troiano family’s duck returned home last week. The duck had visited 20 countries on its journey, from Austria to South Africa." And it returned with a suitcase full of souvenirs from its travels
- What I Left Out: Sharkpedo? - "Under a secret Navy-funded project, World War II scientists attempted to turn sharks into living, bomb-delivery systems." Mary Roach uncovers one of the stranger Cold War spinoffs of WWII research into sharks.
- There's a Section of Yellowstone Where You Can Get Away with Murder - Due to poor framing of the jurisdiction over the national park, an area of Idaho is in a legal limbo: ”Such trivia would scarcely summon a yawn from a layperson, but to a constitutional lawyer like Kalt, it was a flapping red flag… Here was a clear constitutional provision enabling criminal immunity in 50 square miles of America's oldest national park.”
- Old Con, New Twist: The Bizarre History of the Nigerian Email Scam - It seems 419 scammers are continuing a long and ignoble tradition: ”Advance-fee fraud is an updated version of the 19th-century “Spanish Prisoner” con. The first recognizable version of the Spanish scam cropped up in the aftermath of the French Revolution.”
- Signs of Tokyo - Dan Vaughan’s photo blog does exactly what it says on the tin: ”Signs from suburban/metropolitan Tokyo, particularly West Tokyo (Musashino, Mitaka, Setagaya, etc)”
Bonus food linky: norrahe’s blog was two years old yesterday! Join in the celebrations with Sous vide pork cheek carnitas
Happy invoicing!
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