It's started looking quite springlike outside. Anyway, enough of looking out of that window - back to the screen for this lot 
Happy invoicing!
- The Follieri Charade - I somehow missed this story back in 2008: ”Raffaello Follieri had the love of Hollywood princess Anne Hathaway, the illusion of a Vatican imprimatur, an investment partnership with billionaire Ron Burkle, and entrée to Bill Clinton’s inner circle. It wasn’t enough for him. Now that the 30-year-old Italian entrepreneur has been jailed on fraud and money-laundering charges, the author separates the facts from the fantasy of Follieri and Hathaway’s high-flying life.”
- Massive baby blows out 50 trillion-km-long gas blast. And it's beautiful. - Stars will be stars: ”A fraction of them blast out incredible outflows of material, gas and dust shot away from the star. These come in many shapes and sizes, but sometimes the young star will create immensely long and very thin jets… [MHO 2147's jets] are five light years from tip to tip. 50 trillion kilometers.”
- Whale Lice - HT to Netraider, who was inspired by last week's piece about articulating a whale skeleton to find out more about the whale lice mentioned therein: ”Whale lice remain among some of the world’s biologically most specialized but least understood crustaceans… Some features have been learned, however, by a small number of scientists who have studied these interesting crustaceans for over a century, and the following brief account reviews these data.”
- At Any Given Moment in a Process - ”…we have a certain partially evolved state of a structure. This state is described by the wholeness: the system of centers, and their relative nesting and degrees of life.” The architect Christopher Alexander, who coined the concept of Design Patterns which was later embraced by software developers, died a couple of weeks ago. Dorian Taylor explores his ideas.
- The Lancashire origins of comic hero Dan Dare - ”Britain has never produced another hero like Dan Dare. Charlie Connelly pays tribute to a figure with strong Lancashire roots who has shaped our art, literature, science and architecture.” Bonus: find downloadable Dan Dare comics at British Comics
- What made the NES so interesting? - ”I often like to cover oddities here; details of computers and arcade systems people may not have heard of, that didn’t sell well but had unique or interesting characteristics. But focusing on oddities like that can disguise the fact that sometimes, even systems that were very popular can stand out for unique design. Such be it with the Nintendo Entertainment System.” Nicole Branagan explores the classic console.
- The Customer is Always Wrong - Jonathan Nunn on the restaurateurs who fight back against bad online reviews: ”Yes Hater Ali With your only 1 star fake review. you couldn’t get a table. You think you are Mike Tyson?? You touch anyone here, you will be carried out on a stretcher. do not visit this place you will waste your life hater haider. bang”
- His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent. - ”For two decades, Jewish clergy across the country had come to depend on TropeTrainer to help prepare kids for their bar and bat mitzvahs, rites of passage in which young adults chant aloud from the Torah for the first time. But the software wasn’t just a study aid — it was a deep archive of sacred text and music, comprising dozens of different traditions, made easily searchable and infinitely customizable.” But its creator Thomas Buchler has died, and it seems this invaluable cultural resource may be lost forever.
- The Vacuum Tube’s Forgotten Rival - Ken Shirriff ventures away from his own blog to the columns of IEEE Spectrum to tell you all you need to know about magnetic amplifiers: ”During the Second World War, the German military developed what were at the time some very sophisticated technologies, including the V-2 rockets it used to rain destruction on London. Yet the V-2, along with much other German military hardware, depended on an obscure and seemingly antiquated component you’ve probably never heard of… U.S. military-electronics experts of that era were baffled by the extensive German use of this device, which they first learned about from interrogating German prisoners of war. What did the Third Reich’s engineers know that had eluded the Americans?”
- The Art of War - Mike Peterson rounds up a selection of some of the best war cartoons, from WWI to Iraq: ”Over the years, cartoonists have approached wars sometimes as journalists, sometimes as cheerleaders, sometimes as cynics. Soldiers tend to approach it as they have for the past 30 centuries.” Lots of good links in here too
Happy invoicing!
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