Expected to be finished at ClientCo and posting these from the bench again this week. And last week. And the week before. Ah well, only one more week to go. Again 
Happy invoicing!
- Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL - "Very few people are aware of Marvel Whiteside Parsons (a.k.a Jack Parsons), co-founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Parsons made major contributions to rocket development, particularly in the area of solid fuel propellant. The solid motors on the Space Shuttle and the motors in the Minuteman missile were based on the solid propellant technology that he invented... So why isn’t he as celebrated as the other founding fathers of spaceflight? And what was that about the occult?" Described by Werner Von Braun as "The true father of the American space race", Parsons' association with the likes of Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard (who conned him out of cash, a boat, and his wife) led to him being discreetly erased from the history of JPL. (If you're interested in finding out more about Parsons, I can recommend George Pendel's biography Strange Angel.)
- Wat HiFi? - growing collection of the strange claims published in magazines and websites aimed at the kind of person who pays hundreds of pounds for a speaker cable: "I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: greater transparency, improved dynamics and quieter backgrounds. All this from tiny acrylic saw-horses placed beneath my power and speaker cables!"
- The Woman Behind Apple's First Icons - The story of Susan Kare, who in 1982 was commissioned to produce icons and fonts for the Macintosh: “I learned to never just show Steve something and ask, ‘Do you like this?’ because he’d invariably say no. He wanted you to work on it more and come up with something better. The workaround was to come up with several options and ask him which one he liked.”
- Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names - "When working on the paper "The Quest for Ground Truth in Musical Artist Similarity" we built MusicSeer to collect human evaluation of artist similarity. We expected a lot of responses but needed a way to ferret out "bad" results-- robots, users just clicking randomly, and people that didn't know the bands presented. One idea was to pepper the list with "red herrings" in the form of fake bandnames-- and if someone chose one, we'd ignore their responses later on. Instead of thinking up a few, I made a quick script to part-of-speech tag the original list of 6,500 artist names that we were considering. This left us with a set of common band name grammars (popular ones were NNP NNP and NNP #.) We then fed terms from our already collected music text set ('Klepmit') through the grammars again (at the natural probabilities) to make some believable names."
- On The 20th Anniversary – An Oral History of Netscape’s Founding - "On April 4th, 1994, Mosaic Communications Corporation was officially incorporated as a going concern. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s because the company would eventually change its name to Netscape Communications Corporation when the University of Illinois (which owned the trademark on the name Mosaic) threatened legal action... As part of the Internet History Podcast project, I’ve collected oral histories from the founding engineers who made Netscape possible 20 years ago." Some fascinating history in these interviews.
- The cockroach hunter’s spell - "For centuries, the jewel wasp has captivated entomologists with its beauty and, in the case of the female, its hunting prowess. The wasp doesn’t kill its prey right away. Instead, it injects a special venom into its cockroach victim, putting it into a bewitched state. The wasp then builds a burrow, drags in the zoned-out cockroach, lays an egg on it and buries it. The larva that emerges gradually eats the cockroach alive... Over the past two decades, researchers have been trying to tease out the molecular composition of this unusual venom. Not only could the results help researchers understand how this venom acts on an animal’s central nervous system, but they also could lead to a better understanding of certain human neurological disorders that have some of the same symptoms as those found in the entranced cockroach."
- Q&A: Gerd Ludwig’s Long Look at the Chernobyl Disaster - "The engineer indicated I had only a brief moment to shoot. It took him a long minute to open the jammed door. The adrenaline surge was extraordinary. The room was absolutely dark, lit only by our headlamps... I checked my pictures. Out of focus! I begged him to allow me in one more time. He gave me a few more seconds to frame the clock showing 1:23:58 AM—the time when on 26 April, 1986 in the building that housed Energy Block # 4, time stood forever still." Interview with photographer Gerd Ludwig, who has visited Chernobyl four times, even venturing deep inside the reactor building.
- ‘Last time I went into central London I needed a lie down’: life on London’s floating bookshop - Interview with Paddy Screech, who sells books from a converted coal barge on the waterways of London: "I lived in Upper Clapton for seven years. In all that time I met one of my seven neighbours once, as I sat rotting in front of a computer and seeing one of my dozen friends each week. Now I have about 300 friends, only look at the computer for an hour a day and never watch TV. I spend most of my time trying to stop the barge blowing away, or trying to light a fire."
- How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons - "Thirty years ago, a war raged between the dorks who played Dungeons & Dragons, and the conservative parent groups who believed that gaming was debauched at best and Satanic at worst. Lives were ruined. People died. And now that war is over. I still can't believe we won." American parents can get really weird about stuff.
- Clearance Painted Ladies - Shelley Ross takes photos of rather, um, flamboyant house colour schemes in San Francisco: "It's said here that some people buy whatever paint is on the clearance shelf, no matter what the color... That has to be the case with some of these."
Happy invoicing!
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