If you're as bored as I am today, you'll be wanting something to read 
Happy invoicing!
- ‘We’re the Only Plane in the Sky’ - "Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board."
- The Brilliant MI6 Spy Who Perfected the Art of the 'Honey Trap' - The story of Betty Pack, aka MI6 agent “Cynthia”: ”Betty would empathetically listen to his worries, and then go home and type up meticulous reports… During her trysts with Lubienski, she copied the reports that filled his suitcase, and eventually learned that the Poles had cracked Germany’s fabled Enigma Machine, whose codes had stumped Europe for decades. Armed with Betty’s information, the British convinced Poland to share the findings.”
- Microsoft Wants Autistic Coders. Can It Find Them And Keep Them? - Microsoft’s new programme to actively encourage autistic people to come and work for them: ”Mary Ellen Smith, corporate vice president of worldwide operations, and Jenny Lay-Flurrie, now Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer, believed that hiring more autistic employees would be well aligned with Microsoft’s broader goals. They’d also seen firsthand, through their children, that many autistic people are not only perfectly capable of meeting serious intellectual demands—they also can have qualities that are suited for tech jobs, such as being detail-oriented and methodical."
- Star Trek Voyager Opening Sequence - "Today’s post is largely brought to you by the fact that I have been sick the past four days and my fiance and I have been bingeing on Star Trek Voyager. At some point, we began wondering about the sequence from 0:30-0:49 in which Voyager flies through a nebula and leaves a wake of von Karman vortices. Would a starship really leave that kind of wake in a nebula?" I had to use a URL shortener to get this link from **** Yeah Fluid Dynamics past the naughty words filter
- Meet a man who has been dating a crowdsourced Internet girlfriend for the last three months - "This year, a start-up launched that lets lonely souls buy a text message-based significant other. Called Invisible Boyfriend or Girlfriend—depending on your gender of choice—the start-up relies on thousands of crowd-sourced workers to write messages to its customers. Each “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” is not a single person, but instead a rotating cast of workers being paid 5 cents per message to bring the lover created by the customer to life." Kashmir Hill, who worked there, talks to a user of the service.
- Israeli Online Attack Service ‘vDOS’ Earned $600,000 in Two Years - And now their entire infrastructure has been cracked, including their database: ”To say that vDOS has been responsible for a majority of the DDoS attacks clogging up the Internet over the past few years would be an understatement. The various subscription packages to the service are sold based in part on how many seconds the denial-of-service attack will last. And in just four months between April and July 2016, vDOS was responsible for launching more than 277 million seconds of attack time, or approximately 8.81 years worth of attack traffic.” UPDATE: El Reg is reporting that the two DDoS merchants have now been nicked by the FBI: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09...busted_by_fbi/
- An Intro to Videogame Design History - Interesting look at how video game design developed from the 1970s on: ”By first mastering the original roots of videogame design and then building upon those fundamentals, students can come out of their game design programs with a systematic understanding of design: how it is done, how it began and where it is going. And so, to begin, we look back to the earliest days of videogame design."
- What It Feels Like to Die - Jennie Dear on the medical world’s growing understanding of the experience of dying: ”Whether dying is physically painful, or how painful it is, appears to vary. “There are some kinds of conditions where pain is inevitable,” Campbell says. “There are some patients that just get really, really old and just fade away, and there’s no distress.” Having a disease associated with pain doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily endure a difficult death, either.”
- Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom - The wonderfully-named Great Dismal Swamp was a place of refuge for communities of runaway slaves; archaeologist Dan Sayers has been digging there: “In one sense, this has been the most frustrating archaeology project imaginable,” he says. “We haven’t found much, and everything is small. On the other hand, it’s fascinating: These soils are completely undisturbed. You’re scratching the surface of an undiscovered world.”
- The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature - "The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 130,000 books and periodicals published in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1600s to present day. The Library also has manuscript collections, original artwork, and assorted ephemera such as board games, puzzles, and toys."
Happy invoicing!
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