Make the most of a billable Monday by reading this lot; with the current spate of Bank Holidays, it makes a change to be able to charge the time 
Happy invoicing!
- My High-Flying Life as a Corporate Spy Who Lied His Way to the Top - ”I was just looking to make rent when I stumbled into a part-time gig stealing secrets from Wall Street elite. I made millions once I realized how desperate we humans are for someone who will actually listen.” Robert Kerbeck on the riches that can come from social engineering.
- Hobbyist Finds Math’s Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile - ”The surprisingly simple tile is the first single, connected tile that can fill the entire plane in a pattern that never repeats — and can’t be made to fill it in a repeating way.” Always good when longstanding problems in mathematics are solved by some guy just messing around having fun
- The Opening Of King Casimir’s Biological Bomb For A Tomb Ended Very Badly - ”When Casimir IV Jagiellon, the King of Poland, died in 1492, nobody could’ve predicted the death that would follow the reopening of his tomb half a millennium later. Having rotted away into a biological bomb of pathogen potential, it became a hazardous place for the living to poke around in. Unfortunately, in 1973, that’s exactly what a group of archaeologists did.” Who needs a curse?
- How to Shoot an Astro Timelapse - First, find your galaxy: ”In this article, I will share a complete guide to creating an astro timelapse, from planning and preparing for the shoot at home to how to capture the actual frames when you are out in the field.”
- Fictional Brands Archive - Finally, the definitive guide to fictional brands, from the coyote's favourite Acme to Weyland-Yutani: ”Fictional Brands Archive is a collection of many fictional brands found in films, series and video games. It is structured according to the principles of brand identity design and aims to provide a comprehensive view of each fictional brand, framing them in their own fictional context and documenting their use and execution in the source work.”
- The Case of the Fake Sherlock - Inexpert witness: ”Richard Walter was hailed as a genius criminal profiler. How did he get away with his fraud for so long?”
- UK Address Oddities! - Paul Plowman considers house numbers: ”In the HM Land Registry property sales data, the highest house number is 9156, which belongs to a house near Beccles in Suffolk. However there are no other houses on the same road, nor in fact anywhere nearby, which are numbered above 2000. I assume that, in the same way that you can give your house a name, you must also be able to give it a number as a name. There can’t be any other reason why a house on a street with fewer than 10 other houses would be number 9156.”
- The Story of the Coconut War - Ned Donovan on a quirk of sovereignty in the South Seas: ”If you live in a country, you have to follow its laws and pay its taxes, and if you don’t, the only option is to either be punished or move to another country. But imagine for a moment if you could live in Britain but follow the laws of France or vice versa. It would be a pretty strange state of affairs, but it’s precisely how a volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific was governed for almost a century.”
- Euthanasia Coaster - ”Euthanasia Coaster (2010) is a hypothetic death machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being.” Coming soon to Alton Towers?
- Ed Fairburn – Artist/Illustrator - Ed creates portraits based on maps: ”I manipulate paper maps to construct other forms, usually portraiture. I call this process topopointillism; a direct combination of topography and pointillism… I make gradual changes to the contours, roads and other patterns found in cartography. These changes allow me to tease out the human form, resulting in a comfortable coexistence of figure and landscape.” This is Edgware; the Premier Inn, where I once stayed almost every week for a year, is just by the top of the ear
Happy invoicing!
Comment