Running late again today - let's hope their's some pie left once I make it to the pub 
Happy invoicing!
- When Are You Dead? - "A little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard." A look at the history, and current state, of the business of deciding when someone is dead.
- Rabbit holes: Why being smart hurts your productivity - "Designers find themselves studying fancy, new CSS3 effects when they should have been wire framing their checkout page. Hapless students find that they are on the Wikipedia page for Esperanto instead of writing notes on Norse mythology. Like Alice led into Wonderland by the White Rabbit, geeks too easily fall into 'the rabbit hole'." Sridatta Thatipamala considers the merits and demerits of getting distracted from what you were doing.
- The Truth Wears Off - "...the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties." The strange case of scientific fact that gradually becomes unprovable.
- The Lick - "There’s a certain jazz lick that’s so heavily used that it’s just known as The Lick. It’s the only jazz lick I know of that has its own Facebook page. Here’s a greatest hits compilation." Ethan Hein puts together a fine compilation.
- Never Negotiate Piecemeal. Here’s Why - "When I started my first tech company in 1999 I had pretty good tech chops and had led teams but had very little exposure to many other things that matter in a startup including sales, marketing & business development. Like most first-timers, I learned the hard way." Mark Suster explains how to negotiate like a corporate lawyer.
- We both share the same goal - When Douglas Adams was trying to get the H2G2 film project moving, he made sure the executives at Disney knew how to get hold of him: "I've appended a list of numbers you can reach me on. If you manage not to reach me, I shall know you're trying not to, very, very hard indeed." It even includes his local Sainsbury's: "They can page me."
- Swallowed by a whale — a true tale? - "Everyone knows the story of Jonah. But my quest was to find evidence that man, gulped whole, had really survived" Ben Shattuck looks for any cases of people actually surviving in a whale's stomach.
- How I Helped Destroy Star Wars Galaxies - "I sat in front of my laptop at work, watching the videos from the previous night. While logically I knew this was Star Wars Galaxies, I recognized nothing on the screen. It was like watching a completely different game. In that video, I saw the end to what could have been an amazing game, and I saw it end with a whimper. It was like a bloated corpse, already long dead and unaware of it. It was depressing." Patrick Desjardins on how he gamed an online game.
- Forget Your Past - "I first heard about the Buzludzha monument (pronounced Buz’ol’ja) last summer when I was attending a photo festival in Bulgaria. Alongside me judging a photography competition was Alexander Ivanov, a Bulgarian photographer who had gained national notoriety after spending the last 10 years shooting ‘Bulgaria from the Air’. Back then he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range... I knew instantly that I had to go there and see it for myself." Excellent photos of an abandoned Soviet-era monumental building.
- Darkness - Rather odd graphic novel by Boulet.
Happy invoicing!
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