Long grind until Easter this year, isn't it? Might as well pass the time reading stuff like this rather than doing anything useful:
Happy invoicing!
- Sandy Fawkes: The Reporter and The Serial Killer - ”In 1974, a British journalist met a stranger at a hotel bar and agreed to a road trip. She wanted to see America.” And that's how a Daily Express reporter came to unwittingly spend several days travelling with serial killer Paul John Knowles
- Animal Photo Art References Search - Sounds bland, but AFAIK this is the only search engine that allows you to find pictures of animals by skull orientation
- The Decades-long Struggle to Draw a Realistic Black Hole - ”We’re probably going to get our very first actual picture of a black hole next week. Researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have scheduled a press conference for the morning of April 10, and they’re expected to unveil an image of a supermassive black hole… We have a pretty good idea of what a black hole might look like. The reality, however, is that we don’t actually have any confirmation. As EHT member Katie Bouman puts it in a TEDx talk, there could be an elephant at the center of our galaxy for all we know.” Even the one in Interstellar was deliberately changed from the predictions of physics to make it look “better”.
- Pattern in Islamic Art - Pretty, non-representative art: ”This website offers an archive of over 4000 images of patterns and other design features drawn from the rich cultural heritage of the Islamic world. Historically, the decorative arts have always formed a major part of Islamic aesthetic expression. Its remarkable achievements in this direction (much of which are represented here) make it an invaluable resource for designers of all kinds as well as for art-historians and art-lovers generally.”
- 50 years of RFCs - ”Fifty years ago today, on April 7th, 1969, Steve Crocker published a document that would come to be known as RFC-1. Crocker was working on a piece of the ARPA Network, or ARPANET… Crocker decided to document what people were thinking and what people had come to tentative agreements on. RFC-1 is this documentation.” 50 years yesterday now, time being what it is, but RFCs are still the foundation of how the workings of the Internet are defined. Darius Kazemi is reading one a day in 2019, so here’s his writeup of RFC-1 from the start of the year. And of course the (originally typewritten) document is now available on the current version of the network whose operations it sought to explain, and there’s a PDF of scans of original copies of the early RFCs at the Computer History Museum.
- Museum of the Soviet Synths - Soviet synthesisers, presumably inspiring bands such as Old Woman Cleaning The Metro Army and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Caspian. This is a Faemi-1M: ”A polyphonic analog synthesizer Faemi - 1M (Kachkanarsky radiofactory) has a keyboard of 4 octaves. Main generator, infralow frequency generator, lowpass filter, amplifier are in the basis of the synthesis in this instrument. The control panel is divided into 5 sections: generator, timbre, vibrato, filter, amplifier.”
- How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong - The games industry was pretty idiotic when I worked in it thirty years ago, and things don’t seem to have improved much: ”Very few things went right in the development of BioWare’s latest game, an online cooperative shooter that was first teased in mid-2012 but spent years floundering in pre-production. Many features weren’t finalized or implemented until the very final months, and to some who worked on the project, it wasn’t even clear what kind of game Anthem even was.”
- New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life - ”A newfound pair of giant viruses have massive genomes and the most complete resources for building proteins ever seen in the viral world. They have refreshed the debate about the origins of these parasites.”
- Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old today - Yesterday wasn’t only the 50th anniversary of the RFC, but also the 55th anniversary of the iconic IBM computer. In its honour, Ken Shirriff offers a detailed guide to the operator consoles of the various models, aka Das Blinkenlights: ”You might wonder why these computers had such complex consoles. There were three main uses for the console. The first use was basic ‘operator control’ tasks such as turning the system on, booting it, or powering it off… The second console function was ‘operator intervention’: program debugging tasks such as examining and modifying memory or registers and setting breakpoints… The third console function was supporting system maintenance and repair performed by an IBM customer engineer. The customer engineering displays took up most of the console and provided detailed access to the computer's complex internal state.”
- Memory of the Netherlands: The Collection of the Dobbelman Soap and Detergent factory in Nijmegen from 1807-1998 - The National Library of the Netherlands brings you that gallery of Dutch soap wrappers you’ve been waiting for
Happy invoicing!
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