Apparently Churchill can only read these when he's at work, so I'll post them now:
Happy invoicing!
- Snowflakes and Snow Crystals - " Your online guide to snowflakes, snow crystals, and other ice phenomena." If all this unpleasant sunshine is making you pine for the refreshing coolness of winter, try reading lots of interesting stuff about snow and ice, including instructions for how to grow your own snowflakes in the lab.
- Jaws: A movie review - How Jaws might be reviewed by climate change deniers. "Matt Hooper from the 'Oceanographic Institute' turns up. No-one seems to have called him, he just kind of appears. I've heard that scientists can actually smell sources of funding from up to 50 kilometers away.... What alarmist nonsense! He just blew through all those equally good explanations. And as the local pointed out 'nobody's seen a shark'. So it's unscientific for Hooper to assert there definitely is a shark. He's hiding the uncertainty and doubt. Of course if he admitted there wasn't a shark all his funding would dry up..."
- How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 other things nobody told me) - "It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past. This list is me talking to a previous version of myself." Artist Austin Kleon, whose newspaper blackout poems appeared in Monday Links Vol. II, offers advice on creativity and inspiration.
- WWLLN: World Wide Lightning Location Network - "With our network of sferic sensors we are producing regular maps of lightning activity over the entire Earth." At last, an easy way to determine if those loud noises and flashes of light outside your window are coming from a thunderstorm, without having to actually get off the web
- Mobile Design and Development - Brian Fling's book, published last month by O'Reilly, is also available in its entirety online
- My dalliance with smart drugs - and the lesson I learned - Johann Hari describes his experiences of using Provigil: "I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once."
- Venice Backstage - "Venice is not just a stage set. It is also a city with a resident population, which has productive activities, transportation and services. But how does the “Venice system” work? How do the tides in the lagoon behave? How are the canals formed? And the embankments? What’s under the buildings? Venice Backstage, a project conceived by Insula spa, the operative arm of the City for urban maintenance, is about what happens behind the curtains, to make the fragile beauty of this fantastic city easier to appreciate."
- The Audacity of Getting Paid - "Too many of the biggest sites on the internet today provide “free services”: they choose not to charge their users. This is a costly mistake that we’ll see play out again and again over the next few years as these sites struggle to simultaneously pay back venture capital investments and scale their services up, up, and up." @cbowns explains why you should charge for what you make, even online.
- The Social Organization of the Computer Underground - "The twentieth anniversary edition of Gordon Meyer’s seminal sociological study of phreakers, hackers, and pirates... chronicles the “golden age” of hacking before the Feds got scared and began their infamous crackdown." Available as PDF and ePub.
- Whartonite Seeks Code Monkey - a collection of the oddly resistible offers people with MBAs make to the wretched programmers they expect to actually build their brilliant new product. "A total media intelligence service that combines state-of-the-art natural language processing and data mining technology with subject matter-experts who analyze digital conversation to create profitable insights for our clients. The intelligence enables its clients to capitalize on revenue opportunities, gain a competitive advantage, benchmark against its competition and proactively support buyers and its reputation... Wage: $10/hr (Based on Experience)"
Happy invoicing!
Comment