- Serengeti Lions - David Quammen follows the harsh life of a lion known to researchers as C-Boy: "An adult male lion, if he’s lucky and durable, might attain the advanced age of 12 in the wild. Adult females can live longer, even to 19. Life expectancy at birth is much lower, for any lion, if you consider the high mortality among cubs, half of which die before age two. But surviving to adulthood is no guarantee of a peaceful demise"
- The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse - "In contrast to today’s rather mundane spawn of coffeehouse chains, the London of the 17th and 18th century was home to an eclectic and thriving coffee drinking scene. Dr Matthew Green explores the halcyon days of the London coffeehouse, a haven for caffeine-fueled debate and innovation which helped to shape the modern world."
- BUGGER - "It doesn't matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do... In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us." Adam Curtis on the remarkable history of incompetence and eccentricity in the UK's security services, including lots of footage from the BBC's archives.
- Midtown - Another cool time-lapse of NYC, which took 6 months to shoot, using over 50,000 still frames.
- Victor Klemperer: "I am German, the Others Are Un-German" - "The Nazis made Victor Klemperer's life a living hell. Baptized Christian but of Jewish descent, Hitler's henchmen labeled him "un-German." In a bizarre twist of fate, Klemperer could essentially thank a catastrophe -- the bombing of Dresden sixty years ago -- for saving him from the terror of the Nazi regime." Klemperer kept a diary throughout his life, which now provides an insight into the rise and defeat of the Nazis, as experienced by one they persecuted, without the benefit of hindsight.
- The Pixel Painter: A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows 95 - "Lasko, who is legally blind, served in WWII drafting directional and weather maps for bombing raids and later worked as a typographer (back when everything is done by hand)... Decades after his retirement his family introduced him to Microsoft Paint and he never looked back." Bonus linky from the article: Tatsuo Horiuchi, the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist, who uses Excel's shape tool to create pictures because he feels Paint isn't sufficiently flexible.
- Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer? - "A month after ace programmer Sergey Aleynikov left Goldman Sachs, he was arrested. Exactly what he’d done neither the F.B.I., which interrogated him, nor the jury, which convicted him a year later, seemed to understand. But Goldman had accused him of stealing computer code, and the 41-year-old father of three was sentenced to eight years in federal prison." Bizarrely, the FBI seemed to think there was something suspicious about the fact that he used the version control tool Subversion
- Google search suggestions by country - Noah Veltman presents side-by-side comparisons of the suggestions Google comes up with for various phrases in the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Not sure what to make of the fact that, for "How do you..." the UK comes up with "...get thrush" as opposed to the transatlantic nations' "...get pinkeye"; but we're probably still better off than our Antipodean cousins, who "...get scabies".
- Guitar Tuning Nightmares Explained - Jack Endino tells you everything you ever need to know about guitar tuning. "Dislaimer: This is not meant to be a technical paper. It's addressed to working/recording musicians, with whom I've spent most of my waking hours for 15 years, using a conversational-rant writing style. The intent is to enlighten and entertain. Musicians do not respond well to technical papers."
- Fourteen-Year-Old Girl’s Blistering Heavy Metal Performance of Vivaldi - Speaking of guitars: "She is 14 years old, and apparently French. Not much else is known about this precocious young guitarist who goes by the name “Tina S” on her YouTube channel."
Happy invoicing!
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