Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCXCIV

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Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCXCIV

Make the most of a billable Monday by reading this lot; with the current spate of Bank Holidays, it makes a change to be able to charge the time

My High-Flying Life as a Corporate Spy Who Lied His Way to the Top - ”I was just looking to make rent when I stumbled into a part-time gig stealing secrets from Wall Street elite. I made millions once I realized how desperate we humans are for someone who will actually listen.” Robert Kerbeck on the riches that can come from social engineering.
Hobbyist Finds Math’s Elusive ‘Einstein’ Tile - ”The surprisingly simple tile is the first single, connected tile that can fill the entire plane in a pattern that never repeats — and can’t be made to fill it in a repeating way.” Always good when longstanding problems in mathematics are solved by some guy just messing around having fun
The Opening Of King Casimir’s Biological Bomb For A Tomb Ended Very Badly - ”When Casimir IV Jagiellon, the King of Poland, died in 1492, nobody could’ve predicted the death that would follow the reopening of his tomb half a millennium later. Having rotted away into a biological bomb of pathogen potential, it became a hazardous place for the living to poke around in. Unfortunately, in 1973, that’s exactly what a group of archaeologists did.” Who needs a curse?
How to Shoot an Astro Timelapse - First, find your galaxy: ”In this article, I will share a complete guide to creating an astro timelapse, from planning and preparing for the shoot at home to how to capture the actual frames when you are out in the field.”
Fictional Brands Archive - Finally, the definitive guide to fictional brands, from the coyote's favourite Acme to Weyland-Yutani: ”Fictional Brands Archive is a collection of many fictional brands found in films, series and video games. It is structured according to the principles of brand identity design and aims to provide a comprehensive view of each fictional brand, framing them in their own fictional context and documenting their use and execution in the source work.”
The Case of the Fake Sherlock - Inexpert witness: ”Richard Walter was hailed as a genius criminal profiler. How did he get away with his fraud for so long?”
UK Address Oddities! - Paul Plowman considers house numbers: ”In the HM Land Registry property sales data, the highest house number is 9156, which belongs to a house near Beccles in Suffolk. However there are no other houses on the same road, nor in fact anywhere nearby, which are numbered above 2000. I assume that, in the same way that you can give your house a name, you must also be able to give it a number as a name. There can’t be any other reason why a house on a street with fewer than 10 other houses would be number 9156.”
The Story of the Coconut War - Ned Donovan on a quirk of sovereignty in the South Seas: ”If you live in a country, you have to follow its laws and pay its taxes, and if you don’t, the only option is to either be punished or move to another country. But imagine for a moment if you could live in Britain but follow the laws of France or vice versa. It would be a pretty strange state of affairs, but it’s precisely how a volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific was governed for almost a century.”
Euthanasia Coaster - ”Euthanasia Coaster (2010) is a hypothetic death machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being.” Coming soon to Alton Towers?
Ed Fairburn – Artist/Illustrator - Ed creates portraits based on maps: ”I manipulate paper maps to construct other forms, usually portraiture. I call this process topopointillism; a direct combination of topography and pointillism… I make gradual changes to the contours, roads and other patterns found in cartography. These changes allow me to tease out the human form, resulting in a comfortable coexistence of figure and landscape.” This is Edgware; the Premier Inn, where I once stayed almost every week for a year, is just by the top of the ear