It was sunny earlier, but the cows in the field next to ClientCo were lying down. Sure enough, it's turning gloomy now. Prescient cows? 
Happy invoicing!
- The mind readers - Roger Highfield looks at the work of the scientists trying to contact patients who appear unconscious or unresponsive: "Inside, there’s plenty of time to think. At first, this feels like a game, even one that is strangely amusing. Then, reality sets in. You’re trapped. You see and hear your family lamenting your fate. Over the years, the carers forget to turn on the TV. You’re too cold. Then you’re too hot. You’re always thirsty. The visits of your friends and family dwindle. Your partner moves on. And there’s nothing you can do about it."
- Accessing the line mode browser with 1960s tech - Suhayl Khan has hooked up a restored ASR-33 Teletype to a Solaris 8 box running Tim Berners-Lee's early line mode browser to surf the web at
7510 characters-per-second.
- Meeting a Gorilla - Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine visit the gorillas of Zaïre: "He looked from one to another of us without any great concern, and then his attention dropped to his own hands as he idly scratched some flecks of dirt off one of his fingers with his thumb... His eyes followed as my hand squiggled across the paper and after a while he reached out and touched first the paper and then the top of my biro — not to take it away from me, or even to interrupt me, just to see what it was and what it felt like."
- Beneath the feathers: the man who gives wing to Big Bird - "Big Bird, it must be said, is no Hamlet. For one thing, he's covered in 6,000 yellow feathers. And while countless actors around the world have put their stamp on the tortured Danish prince, only one man has ever played the Bird." Caroll Spinney has played Big Bird, among other Muppets, since 1969. A new documentary about him, I Am Big Bird, premiered yesterday in Toronto.
- The Hengwrt Chaucer - "The 'Hengwrt Chaucer' is undoubtedly one of the greatest treasures of the National Library of Wales and one of the best known outside Wales. It is one of the most important texts of Geoffrey Chaucer's work to come down to us, and its importance has recently been magnified by the identification of its scribe as Adam Pinkhurst, one of Chaucer’s London-based associates." Beats the Mills and Boons that occupy so much space in my local library; high-quality photographs of the whole book are now online.
- Game of Thrones: How airlines woo the one per cent - "The modern aircraft-seating industry is highly specialized... It also poses unique design challenges, since a premium-class seat has to create an impression of opulence in what is actually a noisy and potentially nausea-inducing metal tube filled with strangers." David Owen visits the Shoreditch firm that crams opulence into a space four feet long.
- Was a Woman the first editor of the Qur’an? - "A new study suggests that Hafsa bint ‘Umar, one of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, had a crucial role in editing and codifying the Qur’an and was likely the one of the first people to have kept a written version of the religious text."
- Insane Handbook: Bills Cheerleaders Are Told How To Wash Their Vaginas - It seems that being a Buffalo Bills cheerleader involves being patronised by a bunch of (male) idiots: "A Jill is told what tampons she should wear and how she should keep certain 'intimate areas' fresh, and in general has to submit to a series of byzantine and comically infantilizing requirements and guidelines governing everything from 'appearance etiquette' to 'etiquette for FORMAL dining' to 'communicating with people with disabilities.'"
- Zero to 95,688: How I wrote Game Programming Patterns - Former EA programmer Bob Nystrom explains how he drove himself to finish his new book, which is available free online now and will soon be available in ebook and paper formats: "About an hour ago, in the quiet of my living room, alone except for a sleeping dog next to me, I accomplished the biggest goal of my life... It’s a book on game programming (it would be a weird title for a book on ornithology) that I started writing about four years and a lifetime ago."
- Project Thirty-Three - "Project Thirty-Three is our shrine to circles and dots, squares and rectangles, and triangles, and the designers that make these simple shapes come to life on vintage album covers." Nice:
Happy invoicing!
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