Early today as I need to pop into town, again 
Happy invoicing!
- The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History - "Jensen assumed the unplanned reboot was a typically brusque move by Maersk’s central IT department, a little-loved entity in England… Jensen looked up to ask if anyone else in his open-plan office of IT staffers had been so rudely interrupted. And as he craned his head, he watched every other computer screen around the room blink out in rapid succession." Excellent piece about shipping giant Maersk being crippled by NotPetya, and how they recovered.
- Is Love Vine Parasitizing Wasps? - Questions to which the answer is "Yes": "While looking for galls on sand live oak (Quercus geminata) growing in southern Florida, Dr. Scott Egan and his colleagues noticed something odd. A small vine seemed to be attaching itself to the galls." This is a good account of what they found but if you want the juicy details, their paper is published in Current Biology: Botanical parasitism of an insect by a parasitic plant.
- Flight of Fancy - "In directing five Bond films, the most of any director, John Glen has delivered more than his share of thrills and chills. But nothing tops the heart-pounding opening of Octopussy." Excellent account of the process of filming a Bond pre-credit sequence in the days before you could just make it all up on a computer
- My Mom, the Missile Computress - Karen Piper on her mother's battle to overcome sexism and become a leading programmer on a top-secret missile research base: "My mom started as a GS-3 math aid, which involved using a miniature calculator and ‘keypunching data and programs’ into the mainframe computer… within a decade, she wrote of her credentials, ‘I have a system level knowledge of Tomahawk’s navigation,’ including its ‘Inertial Navigation System (INS), Global Positioning System (GPS), barometric and radar altimeters, pre-stored terrain altitude profiles (TERCOM maps), and terrain imagery.’”
- Shakespeare's Plays Summarized in Simpsons Quotes - Just that.
- A Constructive Look At TempleOS - TempleOS is an operating system written by schizophrenic programmer Terry A. Davis on orders from God. It’s being reported that Davis died recently, though it’s currently unclear if those reports are correct. Anyway, here’s Richard Mitton’s look at his operating system: ”Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple, a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from schizophrenia, and has a tendency to appear on various programming forums with a burst of strange, paranoid, and often racist comments. He is frequently banned from most forums… There are many bad things to be said about TempleOS, many aspects of it that seem poorly constructed or wouldn't work in the ‘real world’. I'm going to ignore them here. It's very easy to be negative, but you will never learn anything new by doing so.” There’s also this profile of Terry from a few years ago: God's Lonely Programmer.
- When Snails Attack: The Epic Discovery Of An Ecological Phenomenon - ”West Coast Rock Lobsters (Jasus lalandii) or ‘kreef’ as they are known locally were everywhere around Malgas [Island]. Several hundred of them per square meter crowded into crevices and under ledges… Around Marcus Island, though, ‘the bottom was covered with anything but lobster’.” When Amos Barkai launched an experiment to try to find the explanation for the different ecosystems, things didn’t quite go to plan, but much was learned…
- The New Science of Seeing Around Corners - "Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what’s being said and faint images of what’s around a corner." This is some crazy stuff. I’m no expert on this subject but I think this is related research, so I’m throwing it in anyway: Physicists hack the human visual system to create “ghost images”.
- Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories and Good News vs. Bad News - Maria Popova explores some interesting ideas from Vonnegut: ”All the recent excitement reminded me of an old favorite, in which Vonnegut maps out the shapes of stories, with equal parts irreverence and perceptive insight, along the ‘G-I axis’ of Good Fortune and Ill Fortune and the ‘B-E axis’ of Beginning and Entropy.”
- Monumentalism - ”Monumentalism is a visual study of socialist architecture and design. Every photograph on this site was taken by Darmon Richter, a British researcher who has spent the last 10 years exploring Eastern Europe with his camera.” You’ll no doubt remember some of his work from Inner Mongolia appearing here a couple of years ago. This is the Monument to the Georgian Warrior Heroes in Gori:
Happy invoicing!
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