It still feels weird having a gig close enough to home that I get back at a reasonable hour, and therefore have time to put this lot together for your edification:
Happy invoicing!
- The 2010 “Editing Wikipedia From Inside Parliament” Awards - "Here's a fact: Wikipedia stores the IP addresses of anonymous users. Here's another fact: all of the web traffic from the Houses of Parliament is sent through one of two proxy servers — which means that every anonymous edit to Wikipedia from within Parliament is attributed to one of just two IP addresses. I'm sure you can see where this is going." Tom Scott hauls a few skeletons out of our elected representatives' assorted closets.
- I Think You're Fat - "This story is about something called Radical Honesty. It may change your life. (But honestly, we don't really care.)" A. J. Jacobs gives psychotherapist Brad Blanton's ideas about total honesty a try in real life, with interesting and sometimes surprising results.
- Captured: The Ruins of Detroit - "Up and down Detroit’s streets, buildings stand abandoned and in ruin. French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre set out to document the decline of an American city." Fascinating gallery of abandoned buildings, including a library still containing many books, and a police station whose floor is littered with discarded mugshots.
- When Soaps Die - "For a country where more people read about the mercurial fortunes of their TV favourites than actually watch them on the box, it’s still the case there’s little which sets the pulses racing faster than the whiff of an impending national execution. And there’s no greater quarry than an ailing soap opera." Ian Jones examines the phenomenon of the dying TV soap opera. I'd never realised just how bizarre the final episode of Brookside was (because, like almost everybody else, I didn't watch it.)
- Open Sourcing My Genetic Data - "Today, I published all of my known genetic data as open source and released all my rights to the data. Roughly 1 million of my genetic markers are now in the public domain. I believe that I’m one of the first people in the world to commit my genetic data into a decentralized source control system." Manu Sporny explains why and how he's given his genetic code to the world for free.
- Studio Multitracks: Gimme Shelter - "One of the more amazing recent developments in music is the ability to hear isolated tracks from many of the best songs in rock history. You can hear things you’ve never heard before even if you’ve heard the song 1000 times. For anyone who’s recorded or listened to music, this is a major treasure trove. This blog aims to seek these tracks out." There's loads of material on this blog; I've linked to the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter broken down into separate tracks for vocals, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, percussion/drums, and bass.
- All the volcano webcams of the world - "So, I finally got this project done! We all do a lot of webcam watching here on Eruptions. A lot of the time when a new eruption occurs, the first question posted is 'is there a webcam?', so I thought I’d try to come up with a definitive list of extant volcano webcam, organized by region of the world." This list should save you the trouble and inconvenience of travelling halfway around the world only to be immolated by a pyroclastic flow.
- 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal - Good article about The Singluarity, and particularly Ray Kurzweil: "Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away."
- How Deaf People Think - "Today I found out how deaf people think in terms of their “inner voice”. It turns out, this varies somewhat from deaf person to deaf person, depending on their level of deafness and vocal training. Those who were born completely deaf and only learned sign language will, not surprisingly, think in sign language. What is surprising is those who were born completely deaf but learn to speak through vocal training will occasionally think not only in the particular sign language that they know, but also will sometimes think in the vocal language they learned, with their brains coming up with how the vocal language sounds. Primarily though, most completely deaf people think in sign language. Similar to how an “inner voice” of a hearing person is experienced in one’s own voice, a completely deaf person sees or, more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they “talk” in their heads."
- People Who - You've probably met most of these one time or another - e.g. "People who turn down real-life social activities because they've made commitments in their online game."
Happy invoicing!
I like the People Who one.
I don't understand this web site. A series of boxes of text saying "People who <whatever>" which, when you click on them, takes you to a page with the PWHO logo, the text again and a list of who has blogged it. I'm clearly a phooquitte 'cos I don't get the joke.
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