Feels quite autumnal today. Soon be time to hibernate 
Happy invoicing!
- Life on a ledge - "I was making coffee, getting ready for work, trying to rouse my 21-year-old son. A neighbor called — an ex-cop. “Hey, look out your balcony,” he said. “There’s a jumper on the roof on the other side of the street.” I could see the woman on the ledge. My son wouldn’t look. “I don’t want that in my brain,” he said. But I kept checking. The last time I looked, she jumped." Frank Main on the life, and death, of Kendra Smith.
- Avant Garde - "Avant Garde is a seminal, but somewhat overlooked by a wider public, magazine, which broke taboos, rattled some nerves and made a few enemies… The magazine’s logo, which inspired the typeface, is a perfect encapsulation of what the magazine represented in 1968, the year the magazine launched: exciting, vibrant, edgy, with just the right amount of playfulness to move it out of the corporateness its geometric sans serif forms might otherwise imply.”
- I Let Facebook’s Algorithms Run My Life For Weeks - Charlie Warzel finds out what happens when you give yourself over to Facebook: ”[Facebook is] a platform that is constantly, relentlessly asking you to feed it data and, at the end of every scroll, baiting you to forge new connections while connecting you to people you like and love in sometimes powerful ways. Which is precisely how last week I invited just over 240 people to help me plan a birthday party for a man I’d met just twice.”
- Lucy’s Lullaby: How losing our grip 3 million years ago may have set us on the path to language - Dr Fiona McMillan speculates on how the shift from ape to hominid might have led to the development of language: ”The shift towards bipedal locomotion required a whole body re-structure to provide support, balance and ease of motion. This included changes to the foot, knee, femur, the lumbar vertebrae, the curvature of the spine and the sacrum at its base, and of course, the pelvis. There was another change, too. It’s one that you might not intuitively associate with walking upright, yet it may have played an important role in setting us on the path toward language and symphonies and quantum physics.”
- Confessions of a killer policeman - "In a state bloodied by decades of armed rebellion, Thounaojam Herojit became one of India’s most deadly policemen – killing more than a hundred people. This year, he became something rarer still: an executioner who wanted to tell the world about his crimes.”
- Which Big Tent Cost More: #GBBO or Henry VIII’s Field of Cloth of Gold? - Greg Jenner on C4’s recent purchase of a tent and some ovens: ”Is that the most amount of money ever spent on a tent-based spectacle? If we forgive the technicalities, and forget that there were many tents and pavilions at Henry VIII’s Field of Cloth of Gold diplomatic shindig with his frenemy Francis I of France in 1520, then let’s have some fun by putting this political extravaganza up against BBC One’s primetime cake TV behemoth.”
- Framed - The bizarre case of a Californian mother who was framed on drugs charges by a married couple of lawyers in revenge for a perceived slight on their child: ”The cop wanted her car keys. Kelli Peters handed them over. She told herself she had nothing to fear, that all he’d find inside her PT Cruiser was beach sand, dog hair, maybe one of her daughter’s toys… Now she watched as her ruin seemed to unfold before her. Watched as the cop emerged from her car holding a Ziploc bag of marijuana, 17 grams worth, plus a ceramic pot pipe, plus two smaller EZY Dose Pill Pouch baggies, one with 11 Percocet pills, another with 29 Vicodin. It was enough to send her to jail, and more than enough to destroy her name.”
- Now this is a story all about how we found the Wet Princes of Bel Air - Interesting techniques for analysing satellite data to determine who uses the most water in LA: ”We knew from data from California’s largest utilities that 4 of the 5 biggest residential water users under their jurisdictions were in ZIP code 90077 – the Bel Air neighborhood. But the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wouldn’t tell us who those customers were… After our original stories ran, David Murray, a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma, sent an email to Reveal senior reporter Lance Williams. “Couldn’t you use satellite imagery to figure out who the biggest customer was?” he asked.”
- What Made Scunthorpe Famous - "It certainly wasn’t the view. The British city of Scunthorpe has had a problem dogging it for decades, and lazy online programmers are to blame." Ernie Smith on what has become known as the Scunthorpe Problem, which trips up many naughty words filters.
- Daily Spoon - "The past year Stian spent most of his time exploring the unique organic qualities of wood and how adding of a function can beautifully refine a piece of wood. The project consists of 365 unique hand carved spoons made from various types of wood. One carved everyday through a year."
Happy invoicing!
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