I'm having open heart surgery tomorrow morning, but don't worry - I've set up a small bot to garner links for me while I'm under the anaesthetic, so assuming I'm still here to post them, there'll be more next week 
And with all that snow descending on the place, you want something nice and warming for dinner, such as norrahe’s Beef, marrowbone and Guinness stew
Happy invoicing!
- I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor - ”One day, sitting in the shed I live in, I had a revelation: within the current climate of misinformation, and society's willingness to believe absolute bulltulip, maybe a fake restaurant is possible?… In that moment, it became my mission. With the help of fake reviews, mystique and nonsense, I was going to do it: turn my shed into London's top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor.” How Oobah Butler built up a world-class reputation as a restaurateur without ever having served a single customer, thanks to TripAdvisor’s algorithms.
- Building a new IMDB: Internet Mince Pie Database - "It’s been a long held ambition to work in an organisation with the scale to answer a very controversial and difficult question… As Cloudflare’s London office has grown in the last 4 years I believe 2017 is the year we reach the tipping point where this is possible. A paradigm-shift in the type of challenges Cloudflare is able to tackle. We could finally sample every commercially available mince pie in existence before the 1st of December. In doing so, we would know conclusively which mince pie we should all be buying over Christmas to share with our friends & families.”
- The world’s largest and oldest organism is super stressed out - "The largest and oldest living organism on Earth is the Pando clone, a quaking aspen colony of over 47,000 trees in Utah that stretches over 106-acres, weighs 13 million pounds, and is 80,000 years old." Unfortunately for it, humans of the European variety have started living in its vicinity in the last few hundred years, and we all know what that does to the neighbourhood of nice ecosystems
- The Secret Ska History of That Weird Levitating Businessman Emoji - "It’s one of the least popular emojis (ranked 1233 of 1679 on Twitter), perhaps because nobody is really sure what it is or how to use it. There aren’t many hints. It’s filed under the ‘activity’ section on iOS, and its description, when rolling over the icon in iMessage—‘Man in business suit levitating’ (MIBSL)—isn’t exactly helpful." Turns out it involves reggae star Peter Tosh and the creator of Comic Sans
- To Bite And Not Be Bitten: The Challenge Of The Caiman-Eating Jaguars - Artist Mauricio Antón: ”Among the pantherine cats, it is difficult to imagine a killing bite more different from that of sabertooths than the one employed by jaguars in South America to hunt caimans. What sort of anatomical adaptations allow the jaguar to deliver a bite devastating enough to kill a creature that boasts one of the most formidable armours in nature? In a recent assignment from National Geographic Magazine we set to explore precisely that subject, and how to reflect it in images."
- Chronicler of Islamic State ‘killing machine’ goes public - "The historian carried secrets too heavy for one man to bear. He packed his bag with his most treasured possessions before going to bed: the 1 terabyte hard drive with his evidence against the Islamic State group, an orange notebook half-filled with notes on Ottoman history, and, a keepsake, the first book from Amazon delivered to Mosul. He passed the night in despair, imagining all the ways he could die, and the moment he would leave his mother and his city." The story of scholar and blogger Mosul Eye who detailed the atrocities of ISIS in Mosul, who has finally revealed his true identity.
- The future is here – AlphaZero learns chess - ”On December 5 the DeepMind group published a new paper at the site of Cornell University called ’Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm’, and the results were nothing short of staggering. AlphaZero had done more than just master the game, it had attained new heights in ways considered inconceivable.” Excellent chess-focused look at the startling achievements of DeepMind’s AlphaZero.
- Decapping ICs with Sulphuric Acid - "There are only two hard parts about IC decapsulation: obtaining a usable acid and doing it safely." One for Zeity, should he be passing by
- Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance - The bad debt industry in the USA is full of scammers and general scumbags. What a surprise. But when they went after Andrew Therrien, they got more than they bargained for: ”Therrien had been caught up in a fraud known as phantom debt, where millions of Americans are hassled to pay back money they don’t owe… The targets were shocked by Therrien’s doggedness. In their world, complaints are common, but most victims give up after being promised they won’t be called again. One shady-debt player tells me he suspected Therrien was an undercover federal investigator because he’d gathered so much information on his business.”
- Japanese Mascots Are Too Damn Big - So here’s a load of photos of them getting wedged in doors
And with all that snow descending on the place, you want something nice and warming for dinner, such as norrahe’s Beef, marrowbone and Guinness stew
Happy invoicing!
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