It may look sunny out but it's also rather cold, so you're probably better off staying in with the Internet for company 
Happy invoicing!
- The House That Spied on Me - Kashmir Hill, using a logging router provided by Surya Mattu, finds out just what her "smart home" is saying: "Thanks to the Internet of Things, I could live in my very own tech-mediated Downton Abbey. That’s the appeal of smart homes for most people, and why they are supposed to be a $27 billion market by 2021. But that wasn’t my primary motivation. The reason I smartened up my house was to find out whether it would betray me."
- A Detailed Timeline of The IMAGE Mission Recovery - Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley recently discovered that a NASA probe thought lost was trying to contact home again: "The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, or IMAGE, spacecraft was re-discovered in January 2018 after more than twelve years of silence. A powerhouse of magnetosphere and aurora research, the IMAGE mission was a key driver of studies of the Sun-Earth connection from its launch on March 25, 2000, until its last contact on Dec. 18, 2005. Now a watchful citizen scientist, NASA, and a team of IMAGE scientists and engineers detected and received data from the spacecraft. Here’s how it happened."
- Sol LeWitt’s Conceptual Conundrums Haunt Two Texas Women - Jonna Hitchcock's mother bought a house containing a covered-up mural by Sol LeWitt. But do they have the right to uncover it and, if they do, is it still a painting by Sol LeWitt? "The artist was very clear in his philosophy and in the language of certificates of ownership for his works; the [Menil Collection] owns this work, not merely its instructions… Any interpretation otherwise is either misunderstood, misinformed or at worst, disingenuous. The wall drawing (it’s not a painting) at the residence is no longer a sanctioned work of art by LeWitt."
- The Shallowness of Google Translate - Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid among other works and noted cognitive scientist, consider whether Google Translate exhibits any actual understanding of language: "Machine translation has never focused on understanding language… Could it in fact be that understanding isn’t needed in order to translate well? Could an entity, human or machine, do high-quality translation without paying attention to what language is all about?"
- The daredevil climber risking his life for breathtaking views - "Vitaliy Raskalov overcame his fear of heights by scaling the world’s tallest buildings, ignoring any need for safety." He got stuck at the top of the Shanghai Tower for hours, waiting for low cloud to clear, whence he took this photo of the World Financial Centre and the Jin Mao Tower:
- The History of Teaching Machines - Neat interactive timeline of the automation of education, by Audrey Watters in support of a forthcoming book on the history of such appliances.
- To Understand Habitability, We Need to Return to Venus - Elizabeth Tasker argues that we must understand the extremely inhospitable planet to aid in our search for possible habitable worlds elsewhere: "What we want is an exo-Earth. What we don’t want is an exo-Venus."
- Here are 31 better names for City Thameslink, the worst name for a railway station ever devised - Jonn Elledge: "City Thameslink is, of course, the worst name for a railway station ever devised. It’s so bad, it actually manages to be bad in about eight different ways… So: I’ve given rather a lot of thought to what it could be called instead."
- Door Hatch Restoration - Fixing a broken hinge with silver soldering: "This hinge is badly bent, and one of the two tabs holding the hinge barrel to one of the sides is broken. The damage was sufficiently extensive that I considered trying to source a replacement. However, there’s a funny calculus with broken stuff that makes really far gone things better candidates to work on. If something is just a little broken, you worry about making it worse by attempting a repair. However, if something is so toast that it should probably be replaced, well suddenly you have nothing to lose and all sorts of crazy repair attempts are on the table. It’s quite liberating, really."
- Reklame in der DDR - Advertising from the glory days of the workers' paradise of East Germany.
Happy invoicing!
Comment