Busy, busy, busy - read these for me and have an executive summary on my desk first thing in the morning:
by @jrecursive
Happy invoicing!
- UK Adopts Open Government License for everything: Why it’s good and what it means - "Yesterday, the United Kingdom made an announcement that radically reformed how it will manage what will become the government’s most important asset in the 21st century: knowledge & information." Good commentary from David Eaves on the recent announcement that UK Government data licensing will be open by default.
- Notting Hill Gate Tube Station's Time Capsule - "An amazing collection of posters has decorated the walls of a disused passageway in the Notting Hill Gate tube station since it was blocked off in 1959." Here's Mikey Ashworth's full set of photos on flickr.
- Once Upon a Title - "pervy little stories made entirely from children's book titles." Indeed...
- How to form a habit - "This has nothing to do with nuns' clothing. Habits are those behaviours that have become automatic, triggered by a cue in the environment rather than by conscious will. Health psychologists are interested for obvious reasons - they want to assist people in breaking unhealthy habits, while helping them adopt healthy ones. Remarkably, although there are plenty of habit-formation theories, before now, no-one had actually studied habits systematically as they are formed." A report from the British Psychological Society on recent research that challenges a few preconceptions.
- The 10 Most Shameful RPG Dice - "If role-playing games have one thing in common, it's that almost all of them use specialized dice. You know, the kind of dice you won't find in casinos; the dice with more (or less) than six sides; the dice that you might carry in an elaborate leather pouch; the dice that cause your parents, classmates and even some fellow nerds to look at you with disdain. Unfortunately, these people have a point -- there is a fine line between dice being 'special' and dice being 'retarded.' Here now are ten of the dumbest dice ever constructed for role-playing games."
- A Look At The Technologies & Industries Senators Leahy & Hatch Would Have Banned In The Past - "The more I look at the 'Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act,' (COICA) bill proposed by Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch (and co-sponsored by Sens. Herb Kohl, Arlen Specter, Charles Schumer, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Evan Bayh and George Voinovich) the worse it looks. The idea behind the bill is to give the Justice Department the ability to avoid due process in shutting down or blocking access to sites deemed 'dedicated to infringing activities.'" Where the USA leads, our illustrious leaders tend to follow...
- In Which We Learn That It Is Unwise to Drink and Handle Snakes - "One of the first things you learn as a science writer is that even the driest-seeming research papers can hide incredible stories. Sometimes, you just have to look hard. Other times, the story will reach right out of the pages of the journal and grab you by the neck. I recently discovered a research article that did just that. The paper, published in the journal Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, is called 'Joseph Clover and the cobra: a tale of snake envenomation and attempted resuscitation with bellows in London, 1852.'"
- Best and Free Programming Ebooks with Open Source Licenses - "Today in WebDesignish we are presenting very useful and recommended list of programming Ebooks with open source licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL, etc. The books can be about a particular programming language or about computers in general." I could have saved these up and linked to them all individually, but if you really need to learn something new right now that wouldn't help:
by @jrecursive
- **** the South - Excellent rant (which I've had to link to via a URL shortener, thanks to the naughty words filter): "**** the South. **** 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep."
- Damn You Autocorrect! - "Bring me a terbium..." "Terbium?" "Redbull. ******* autocorrect" Fine collection of the strange things people text to each other when autocorrect decides to be "helpful"
Happy invoicing!
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