You can either read these now, or wait until tomorrow so you're still billing for the time 
Happy invoicing!
- I Smuggled My Laptop Past the Taliban So I Could Write This Story - Bushra Seddique on her escape from Afghanistan: ”I had heard about the Taliban all my life. But I had never actually seen a Talib before. Suddenly they were everywhere, patrolling the streets of Kabul… I had to choose between my loved ones. How could I leave my mother alone? If one of us girls stayed behind, which one should it be? What if the sister who stayed was killed? What if the sister who tried to escape was killed?”
- A ‘Self-Aware’ Fish Raises Doubts About a Cognitive Test - ”A report that a fish can pass the “mirror test” for self-awareness reignites debates about how to define and measure that elusive quality.”
- How Stephen Wilkes Shot Gorgeous ‘Day-to-Night’ Photos for Nat Geo - ”Wilkes’s process for creating his day-to-night photos is complicated and difficult, but this assignment put even more strain on him and his team because of how he wanted his final images to coalesce with the theme of the shoot. To this end, Wilkes and his team spent months in pre-production and planning stages to locate a group of uniquely American locations that represented the various topographical regions of the country.” The NatGeo feature seems to be subscriber-only, at least right now, but here's the link in case it's liberated at some point: America the Beautiful
- The Twisted Life of Clippy - ”In the ’90s, Microsoft created an annoying paperclip that it quickly retired. Its developers never imagined the virtual assistant would become a cultural icon.” The definitive account of that damn thing
- DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum - Mark Dastmalchi-Round builds a modern development infrastructure for the Speccy: ”We’re fast approaching the 40th birthday of the Sinclair Spectrum in 2022, and to keep myself occupied during COVID lockdowns I decided it would be a lot of fun to go back and re-visit the computer that started it all for me… The enterprise grew into a curious mix of old and new: Container-based pipelines with Ruby server-side components, all interacting with Spectrum BASIC and z80 assembly code, running on real 1980s hardware with a TCP/IP connection. If you’ve ever wondered how to unit-test Sinclair BASIC programs in GitOps pipelines running on Kubernetes clusters, this is the set of articles for you
” - The Art of Ebru - ”Ebru is the ancient Turkish art of marbling - creating colourful patterns by sprinkling & brushing pigments on water, which are transferred to paper. Highly regarded, it is on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list. Today the tradition continues...” This floral design is by Tuba Bacioglu
- The lost nuclear bombs that no one can find - ”The US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located – they're still out there to this day. How did this happen? Where could they be? And will we ever find them?”
- How learning to communicate with aliens could save humanity - ”Even if there are no aliens.” Eoin O’Carroll considers how learning how to explain our species to others can help us to better understand ourselves.
- And the Bleat Goes On - ”Wait long enough and every enjoyment is eventually placed on the altar, gussied up, and sanctified. Rock ‘n’ roll lyrics were once a readymade source of ridicule, regarded as gibberish written by and for bubblegum brains… Rock and roll, it was righteously felt, would have the final say and the last laugh. Demographics were on its side. On our side, if you were a teenage baby boomer ready to stampede into tomorrow.” James Wolcott considers the longstanding phenomenon of rock lyrics being collected in book form to make them seem like poetry (which sometimes they are).
- The Imaginary Town of an Unconscious Architect: The 387 Paper Model Houses of Peter Fritz - Fritz was an insurance clerk and made the models in the 1950s and 1960s: ”The collection describes a vivid sample of regional Austrian architecture where both the everyday and the vernacular find their dignity. Fritz’s aim looks encyclopaedic, a will to replicate every typology he could have imagined: the bank, the gas station, the farm-house, as well as family houses and fire stations are only some of the actors in the recreation of a sort of imaginary, yet very plausible, town.”
Happy invoicing!
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