FYI, today is International Emoji Day. I still prefer smilies 
Happy invoicing!
- Your car has just been crushed by hagfish: Frequently Asked Questions - Andrew David Thaler has all you need to know about the creatures involved in a road accident in Oregon last week, widely reported on social media as eels, but actually hagfish: ”Slime eel (as well as snot snake) is the common name for Pacific hagfish… Look at the hand holding the fish. Is it completely covered in slime? Then it’s a hagfish.”
- What Would It Take to Completely Sterilize the Earth? - Ed Yong on a recent paper examining the likelihood of all life on Earth being annihilated: ”To be clear, the three researchers aren’t concerned with the fate of humans… Instead, the trio wanted to know what it would take to wipe out all life on the planet.”
- This magical drug mansion in Upstate New York is where the psychedelic ’60s took off - Ahmed Kabil on the history of psychedelic experimentation at Millbrook: ”In September of 1963, Alpert, Leary, and Ralph Metzner (their colleague at Harvard) moved in, along with thirty or so of their followers… The mansion now renovated and replete with the requisite Persian rugs, pillows, mattresses and psychedelic art, its residents could trip with reckless abandon.”
- An Oral History of The Simpsons’ Classic Planet of the Apes Musical - "In a show as jam-packed with memorable moments as The Simpsons, it’s hard to say with any certainty where any one bit ranks. What I do know is when you mention anything about Planet of the Apes to a fan of the show, their mind will instantly jump to the words ‘Dr. Zauis, Dr. Zauis.’… With the third installment of the rebooted Planet of the Apes series coming out this weekend, here is the story of how the musical came together, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z."
- Survivors of America’s first atomic bomb test want their place in history - Yesterday was the anniversary of the Trinity Test, when the world’s first nuclear explosion ushered in a new age. As usual, the local poor people affected by this experiment were largely ignored: ”’I didn’t know at the time what had happened to me,’ said Gilmore. ‘My outer skin gradually fell off the next few days, I used lotions and stuff on it, [but they] didn’t seem to make much difference. A few years later, I began to have skin problems, and I’ve had treatments ever since.’”
- That Healthy Glow (Part 1), That Healthy Glow (Part 2) - More on the careless spread of radioactive materials: ”Pierre and Marie Curie likely never realized the full impact of what they were releasing on the world… The use of radium as an ingredient in patent medications had quickly become big business by the early 1920s. Numerous radium-laced products began to be sold (including radium-laced beauty creams, toothpaste, chocolate bars, soap, etc). Given the lack of real consumer protection legislation, the companies selling the products were free to make grandiose claims about the effectiveness of radiation in curing disease.”
- Catch An Ancient Ferry To A Ghost Station - "We're out in Gravesend to use the most easterly public crossing on the River Thames. It's a half-hourly ferry service that connects this historic Kentish town with an abandoned rail station in Tilbury, Essex. Pedestrians and cyclists only. The limit might be 50 people, but rarely do so many turn up. Catch the ferry on a weekday, and you can have the boat to yourself." Something to do next time you have some free time in London
- The Libertarian Utopia That’s Just a Bunch of White Guys on a Tiny Island - "The people of Liberland love Bitcoin and hate political correctness. There will be no taxes and very few women or people of color. But with some luck, the unrecognized three-square-mile territory on the Western bank of the Danube might one day become the Libertarian utopia for disaffected white men." It’s hard to see how these people manage to convince themselves of their own innate superiority when they’re so clearly a bunch of feckin’ eejits
- How to defend your website with ZIP bomb - Clever idea: plant ZIP files at locations scanned by automated exploitation tools, which when accessed will expand from a comparatively small size to absolutely humongous, thereby using up all the memory on the attacking machine and making it crash: ”As 42.zip shows us it can compress a 4.5 peta byte (4.500.000 giga bytes) file down to 42 kilo bytes. When you try to actually look at the content (extract or decompress it) then you'll most likely run out of disk space or RAM.”
- Rogan Brown - Paper Sculptures - "My work plays with the architecture of nature and organic growth. By identifying patterns and motifs that occur in the natural world in different contexts and at different scales, both macroscopic and microscopic, I have developed a formal, aesthetic vocabulary that I use to construct hybrid sculptural forms, both real and surreal."
Happy invoicing!
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