Hopefully the last set from the actual bench for a while, if the phone interview I've got in 14 minutes works out 
Happy invoicing!
- A Familiar Fear: Flooding & The Underground - "Of all the dangers to such systems that freak natural disasters can pose, it is arguably flood that presents the greatest potential for wholesale damage. New York was warned, and the MTA had moved trains to high ground and put in flood protection where it could, but it was not enough... This seems a good opportunity for us to turn to the subject, and look briefly at the Underground’s own uneasy relationship with water." Excellent study of the history of flood prevention on the Tube, including Cold War floodgates and the Thames Barrier.
- Battle Of The Flagships (50+ Headphones Compared) - Astonishingly detailed review of headphones by David Mahler: "I began writing this review before I started at headphones.com - yes it has taken well over a year to complete! This review is a largely-expanded version of the "20 Headphones Compared" thread which I did in 2010."
- 10 Kick-Ass Secret Passage Bookshelves - "If there’s one dream that unites all bookish folks (aside from, you know, universal literacy) it’s the dream of having a secret passageway hidden behind a bookcase." I've always wanted one; here, Amanda Nelson rounds up ten of the best.
- Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy - BBC Radio adaptation originally broadcast in 1973, free to download from the Internet Archive.
- 360° Video - "We are proud to launch the first full spherical 360 video together with our Red Bull friends. The ViewCam 360 video system makes it possible to experience this Red Bull F1 car from angles you have never seen before. You can decide the angles yourself by using the arrows on your keyboard. With the ability to capture full sphere video, it gives you a sensation of hovering over the car by letting you look straight down." Needs Flash, sadly, but it's worth it to rotate the camera in just about any direction you choose, as the video is playing! (Mouse or trackpad works as well as keys.)
- 12-year-old uses Dungeons and Dragons to help scientist dad with his research - "Alan Kingstone, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, had a problem: all humans have their eyes in the middle of their faces, and there’s nothing that Kingstone could do about it. His 12-year-old son, Julian Levy, had the solution: monsters." Result: Julian ran the experiment and now, aged 14, is listed as the first author on the resultant paper in Biology Letters.
- A Note on Thurber's Dogs - "...for Thurber, the dog chimed with, represented, the American man in his natural state—a state that, as Thurber saw it, was largely scared out of him by the American woman. When Thurber was writing about dogs, he was writing about men. The virtues that seemed inherent in dogs—peacefulness, courage, and stoical indifference to circumstance—were ones that he felt had been lost by their owners." Great overview of James Thurber's writings and drawings about and of dogs. (He's one of my favourite writers and cartoonists.)
- Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves - Remarkable experiment in giving tablets to illiterate children and just seeing what happens: "Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”"
- Monopoly Is Theft - "The official history of Monopoly, as told by Hasbro, which owns the brand, states that the board game was invented in 1933 by an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker from Philadelphia named Charles Darrow... The game’s true origins, however, go unmentioned in the official literature. Three decades before Darrow’s patent, in 1903, a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie created a proto-Monopoly as a tool for teaching the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to “own” land." It's surprising to see how much of Monopoly was lifted directly from the public domain The Landlord's Game, including "Go to Jail" and "Chance" squares.
- 25 Vintage Mustaches - Some goals for the Movemberites to aim for
Happy invoicing!
Fingers crossed!
Comment