Been too busy to even think about these so far today, but now the chap who's got a dependency on the stuff I'm working on (which was specced this morning, despite my asking several weeks agao what to do with it) has spilt coffee all over his MacBook Pro, and has had to stop for a bit 
Therefore I can grab a few minutes to address the needs of the CUK masses:
Happy invoicing!
Therefore I can grab a few minutes to address the needs of the CUK masses:- It might not get weirder than this - When Google's Eric Schmidt went to North Korea recently, he took his daughter Sophie along. Here she recounts her experiences in that alternative reality: "Our trip coincided with the 'Respected Leader' Kim Jong Un's birthday... When we asked how old Un had turned (29? 30?), we were told that 'Koreans keep track of age differently' than we do. Alright, then."
- Would a Butt woman benefit most from a visit to a Tingle maker or a Moleskin shaver? - "These are three of the job descriptions given by respondents to the Census of the Population of England and Wales on 4th April 1881. When an overview of the census was published two years later the authors of the General Report wrote that one hundred obscure jobs were definitely odd..." Amusing look at some of the strange jobs listed in census past, and at what censuses reveal about the growth of industry: specifically, bicycle manufacturing.
- Holborn Viaduct - Patrick Baty (whose piece about front doors you may remember from a few weeks ago) looks at the history of the Viaduct, and its paint: "...the improvements were intended to remedy ‘the evils resulting from the declivities of Holborn Hill and Skinner Street’... Negotiating these slopes, according to the Architect, involved all traffic entering the City in ‘enduring much of the danger and delay which lay in the way of an enemy when London was a walled town.’"
- Did an 8th century gamma ray burst irradiate the Earth? - "A nearby short duration gamma-ray burst may be the cause of an intense blast of high-energy radiation that hit the Earth in the 8th century, according to new research led by astronomers Valeri Hambaryan and Ralph Neuhӓuser." (That's "nearby" in the sense of a few thousand light years, of course.)
- Vietnam was even more horrific than we thought - "Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information, court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and firsthand interviews in Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country."
- Bertrand Russell in Bollywood: The Old Philosopher’s Improbable Appearance in a Hindi Film, 1967 - "Here’s one for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not: Bertrand Russell, the eminent mathematician and philosopher, once made a cameo appearance in a Bollywood movie." Well, a Hindi film, at any rate: sadly, we don't get to see him dancing in a dazzling variety of saris.
- Moon Hoax NOT - S. G. Collins explains why footage of the moon landings could not have been faked: although we had rocket technology that could send men to the moon and back, we didn't actually have movie or video technology that was capable of faking it!
- Lawyer provides incredibly detailed analysis of Bilbo's contract in The Hobbit - It isn't just the film that is considerably longer than the book: the lawyers got to have a go too. "The contract is quite long. This is in contrast with the contract as described in the book, which is very terse... back to the movie version: It has at least 40 major sections and numerous footnotes and digressions in smaller type. We will begin at the beginning and go on till we reach the end, except where the form of the contract requires some jumping around."
- Ten Hundred Words of Science - Inspired by the recent Xkcd comic about the Saturn 5 Rocket Up Goer Five, Theo Sanderson has created The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, an online writing tool that restricts you to using the thousand most commonly used English words. Academics of many disciplines have taken to this with great delight, and this is a collection of some of the best pieces, explaining such things as quantum mechanics ("We know that everything is made of very little things...") and Godel's Incompletenes Theorem ("Mr Goedel then showed these people how he could build another problem just for them, which they could not answer using numbers together with their other stuff. No matter how much stuff people tried to use, he could always give them a problem which they could not find an answer to").
- Cubicleism - Bill Taylor does amazing reproductions of works of art on a whiteboard in his cubicle at work: "I only do this for 2-5 minutes a day, usually first thing while the computer is firing up. I don’t spend all day doing this as I’d like to keep my job.
Some days I don’t even touch it."
Happy invoicing!
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