Not a great drive down this morning, what with major roadworks right at the start and the A14 doing its "let's all stop for no reason at all" routine. Only one more week, thank God 
Happy invoicing!
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics - "Caltech and The Feynman Lectures Website are pleased to present this online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Now, anyone with internet access and a web browser can enjoy reading a high-quality up-to-date copy of Feynman's legendary lectures. This edition has been designed for ease of reading on devices of any size or shape; text, figures and equations can all be zoomed without degradation." Great use of HTML5, SVG, and other modern browser technologies in presenting Feynman's lectures.
- We Have Always Coded - "Why are there so few male programmers? Evolution. A brief history of women’s work in the field of computing." Wonderful satire, with much grounding in fact, in which Tim Maly examines the ways in which women lead in programming because of their innate abilities compared to men's natural limitations.
- Eric Schlosser: If We Don't Slash Our Nukes, "a Major City is Going to be Destroyed." - Interview with Schlosser, who has managed to gain access to unprecedented amounts of information about the many times things have almost gone seriously wrong in the USA's management of its nuclear weapons: "...we really need to sit down with Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan, and think about how to greatly reduce, if not eliminate, these weapons. And that may sound totally absurd and unrealistic, but when I was in my 20s, if someone had said that the Soviet Union would vanish without a nuclear war and the Berlin Wall would come down and all this would happen without tens of thousands, or millions, of deaths, people would have thought that was absurd."
- In A Big Data World, Marketers Know Shockingly Little About Us - "Big Data is a big deal for businesses, given the potential for marketing departments to discover our innermost thoughts and buying behaviors, and thereby tailor pitches to us. At least, that's the dream. For now, at least based on the data marketing firms actually have on most of us, the dream is far from being realized." Matt Asay discovers that, for all their talk of targeted advertising, the marketeers actually appear to know sweet FA about individuals.
- Where's The Octopus? - "When marine biologist Roger Hanlon captured the first scene in this video he started screaming... Hanlon, senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, studies camouflage in cephalopods--squid, cuttlefish and octopus. They are masters of optical illusion. These are some of Hanlon's top video picks of sea creatures going in and out of hiding." You can never have too many videos of cephalopod camouflage
- David Wallace reads Chaucer - A set of recordings of bits of Chaucer pronounced, as far as we know, as Chaucer would have done; and downloadable BBC documentaries by Wallace on other literature of the period.
- What Witchcraft Is Facebook? - "Mass psychogenic illness—historically known as "mass hysteria"—is making a comeback." Laura Dimon explains that, whereas once you needed a small, isolated community to breed such bizarre phenomena as the Salem Witch Hunts, now Facebook and social media generally are being implicated in outbursts of mass psychogenic illness. This could explain much about General
- Roller Coaster Ride: The Story of Berlin's Rotting Amusement Park - "With its rusting rides and a Ferris wheel turning idly in the wind, a defunct East German amusement park in Berlin fascinates locals and tourists alike. Repeated attempts to reopen "Spreepark" have been thwarted by administrative chaos and incompetence."
- Myths and Misconceptions - "The world of teaching and learning is rife with received wisdom, including the potency of learning styles (which deserves a page to itself), and plenty of other unproven but fashionable ideas." If you've ever had the misfortune of listening to half-baked management ideas about staff training, you'll recognise some of the guff examined here by James Atherton.
- New York City then & now: Famous Daily News photos brought back to life - NY press photographer and Historian of the New York Press Association Marc A. Hermann combines old news photographs with modern shots of the same locations: "March 19, 1942 is a day well captured in the Daily News' archive. Edna Egbert, who lived at 497 Dean St. in Brooklyn, climbed onto her ledge that day. The News captured the distraught woman fighting with the police as she wobbled on the edge.
Happy invoicing!
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