The Olympic Torch is arriving in my home city in a couple of hours - a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to completely ignore it and read this kind of thing instead 
Happy invoicing!
- The ‘Busy’ Trap - "Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work... I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter." Excellent step back to get a bit of perspective by Tim Kreider
- Old OS Maps - "This site is intended just to provide you with a view of England and Wales as it appeared in the Ordnance Survey maps of the 1930's. As an added benefit you can also see how the world looks today using Google maps satellite imagery." Nice integration of Google Maps with scans of Ordnance Survey 1-inch-to-the-mile maps, by Andrew Rowbottom. He doesn't have every old OS map, but plenty of areas are covered.
- Our password hashing has no clothes - Troy Hunt believes password hashing, even with salts, has become useless in the face of Moore's Law. He proves his point with this detailed analysis using freely available software, dictionaries of cracked passwords, and standard hashing algorithms. "One thing I’ve always found a bit amusing – particularly in light of the cracking exercise earlier on – is guidance along the lines of 'It will take X number of days / weeks / months' to crack a particular password. Let me demonstrate with the password '00455455mb17'... The problem is that we just cracked it in 45 minutes. Actually, more accurately, we cracked this one and 24,709 others as well but let’s not split hairs."
- The Manifest Destiny of Artificial Intelligence - "Will AI create mindlike machines, or will it show how much a mindless machine can do?" Brian Hayes considers the history, and future, of AI research.
- I try to make fire without matches - "In January of 2001, I watched a grainy pirate copy of Castaway, starring Tom Hanks... He tries really hard to make fire after he realizes a signal is essential to his survival. He makes it look hard, and I was forced to wonder, just how hard is it to make fire without matches?" It ended up taking Rob Cockerham about a week.
- This Is the Oldest Record In History—Scanned and Recreated From a Photo - "Sometime in 1889, Emile Berliner recorded the first album in the history of the world. Then, that record by the father of the gramophone was destroyed. Today, Patrick Feaster, a sound historian at Indiana University, recreated the album using just a printed photograph of the album." Brilliant stuff
- the full story and conclusion of Tim and Freya #traintales - When a couple started having a massive argument in her train carriage, Janey Godley knew exactly what to do: she live-tweeted the whole thing. "She just told him'I can accept the truth you are incapable of speaking it NOW WHO the **** is TIA and why did she email you?' #traintales" "The train hasn't even MOVED yet"
- Minesweeper First Click: Quality vs. Quantity - Emmett Nicholas analyses data from plays of his online version of Minesweeper: "Between June 8 and June 21, 2012, over a million games (1,078,205 to be exact) were played at minesweeperonline.com, and players tended to click in the middle first..."
- The Diagraphoscope – a wonder-working machine - "Twentieth-century businessman X. W. Witman saw a lot of potential in X-rays... Trading as the Advanced Medical Science Institute, (or the Ozona Company, or one of several other names), Witman and his associates took the machine on tour, setting up temporary offices in well-populated towns and moving on – sometimes rather quickly – when the time was right." There are also plenty of other interesting stories of medical shenanigans at Caroline Rance's The Quack Doctor.
- Walt Disney: The Story of Menstruation - It's not all Mouseketeers in the Magic Kingdom: this 1946 educational film produced by Disney is estimated to have been shown to 105 million American schoolchildren (the YouTube description of it saying it was banned is bollocks). From its Wikipedia entry: "The Story of Menstruation is believed to be the first film to use the word vagina in its screenplay". A little bit of cinema history
Happy invoicing!
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