linkmachinego.com

1 November 2014
[tech] 100 Technical Things Non-Technical People Can Learn To Make Their Lives Easier‘PDFs are Portable Documents. They are made by Adobe and work pretty much everywhere. This is a good format for Resumes. You can often Save As your document and create a PDF. Also, note that PDFs are almost always considered read-only. Word has doc files and newer docx files. When working with a group, select a format that is common to everyone’s version of Word. Some folks may have old versions!’
2 November 2014
[acme] Wile E. Coyote’s Business Card

Wile E Coyote's Business Card

3 November 2014
[comics] Wonder Woman’s Secret Past … the fascinating true story of Wonder Woman’s origins … ‘The much cited difficulties regarding putting Wonder Woman on film—Wonder Woman isn’t big enough, and neither are Gal Gadot’s breasts—aren’t chiefly about Wonder Woman, or comic books, or superheroes, or movies. They’re about politics. Superman owes a debt to science fiction, Batman to the hardboiled detective. Wonder Woman’s debt is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman-suffrage campaigns of the nineteen-tens and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly.’
4 November 2014
[gif] Chopping Purple Cabbage GIF … not a euphemism – chopping cabbage is more visually interesting than it sounds.
5 November 2014
[crime] My Grandma the Poisoner … must-read, car crash story – what if Grandma was slowly poisoning your family? …

I can’t pin down exactly what she did with what ingredients. I can’t even be sure that she really did the things I think she did. All I have, really, are pieces of circumstantial evidence and hunches that have coalesced over the years. In my narrative of suspicions, she preferred to use vitamin A (which can cause sleepiness, blurred vision, and nausea, among other things), then she used laxatives, and then, as she got older and lazier, she moved on to prescription drugs.

Grandma never cooked the same thing twice, and her creations were greasy beyond belief and usually really weird. For example: chicken baked with apricots and canned tomatoes, or mixed-up ground meats with prunes, or pickled things. She was infamous at the local grocery store. They saved the shark livers for her.

6 November 2014
[weird] The 6 Creepiest Unexplained Phone Calls [Page 1 | Page 2] … ‘An Anonymous Caller Predicted JFK’s Assassination: Sometime after 10 a.m. on a routine workday, an Oxnard, California, switchboard operator received a call from a whispering woman who dropped a bombshell: the president of the United States was going to die in 10 minutes. That time passed without incident, but the woman, still on the phone, doubled-down: “The president is going to die at 10:30.” She continued to babble away with cryptic statements like, “The Supreme Court. There’s going to be fire in all the windows,” and, “The government takes over everything, lock, stock, and barrel,” before the call finally disconnected at 10:25…’
7 November 2014
[wikipedia] First Drafts of History … a tumblr looking at the first draft of Wikipedia articles … The first draft of the iPhone: ‘The iPhone is born from Apple and Motorola’s Alliance. He’s simply a white Motorola E398, like Cupertino’s iPod, with a embedded version of iTunes Music Store. The iPhone has 555 mb free storage, and can transfer one hundred of AAC music files (used by the iTunes Music Store). iPhone’s interest is the price of one music on the iTunes Music Store : 0.99€, when a lot of operators is selling 2€ or 3€ one music. We may be see a opening of the music sell for the mobile in a few month. The iPhone may be come on the market July, 7, 2005, because Apple had convened all the press this day. Note of author : please rewritting my article in a correct english. thank you’
8 November 2014
[net] What happens when you accidentally become internet famous?‘Fist clenched, a look of pure determination on his face, Success Kid is the boy who can do it all. You may have seen his face posted when someone’s particularly proud of an achievement. Success Kid’s real name is Sam Griner and the photo is one of many his mother Laney, a photographer, took of her son and posted on her Flickr page. She still remembers the day and the moment she snapped this picture…’
9 November 2014
[space] Buzz Aldrin’s Reddit AMA Was Pretty Badass‘When one user mentioned that there was no Plan B to get him off the moon and asked what his plan if he’d been simply left to die, Aldrin cooly responded: “To continue trying to fix the problem until the lack of oxygen caused us go to sleep.”’
10 November 2014
Nauseating Inspirational Bullshit From Facebook … a tumblr collecting annoying inspirational quotes from Facebook.

Nauseating Inspirational Bullshit

11 November 2014
[books] Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview

Q: Do you think much about what your legacy will be?

King: No, not very much. For one, it’s out of my control. Only two things happen to writers when they die: Either their work survives, or it becomes forgotten. Someone will turn up an old box and say, “Who’s this guy Irving Wallace?” There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Ask kids in high school, “Who is Somerset Maugham?” They’re not going to know. He wrote books that were bestsellers in their time. But he’s well-forgotten now, whereas Agatha Christie has never been more popular. She just goes from one generation to another. She’s not as good a writer as Maugham, and she certainly didn’t try to do anything other than entertain people. So I don’t know what will happen.

12 November 2014
[gifs] How Paperclips Are Made … animated GIF of the astonishing way paperclips are made.
13 November 2014
[herzog] Werner Herzog Discusses His Unique Career‘Actually, I was completely stoned once with the composer Florian Fricke in Popol Vuh. I was at his home and he had pancakes and marmalade. And I smeared the marmalade and he started chuckling and chuckling. And I ate it and it tasted very well and I wanted another one and took another good amount of the marmalade and the marmalade had weed in it. He didn’t even tell me. I was so stoned that it took me an hour to find my home in Munich. I circled the block for a full hour until finding my place. So I have had the experience.’
14 November 2014
[london] 27 Of The Most Ridiculous Things Posh London Mums Have Said‘It annoys me that my own child wears cotton without any sense of its history or the historic struggles in its manufacture.’
15 November 2014
[winamp] Winamp2-js … the classic media player reimplemented in HTML5 and JavaScript … ‘Winamp, it really whips the llama’s ass!’
16 November 2014
[space] Space Shuttle and Space Station Photographed Together … a stunning photo taken from a Russian supply spacecraft returning to Earth.
17 November 2014
[books] Classic Childhood Books From Yesteryear … as remembered by Craig Deeley

Classic Childhood Books Remembered

18 November 2014
[people] An Investigation into the Weirdest Ronald Reagan Photo You’ve Probably Never Seen‘I like trifling historical mysteries, and this obscure, bizarre photo of a famous man—this image utterly devoid of context—fits the bill. Who shot it? Where? What were the circumstances of the occasion? And who is the boy? I talked to Krassner first. I’d been looking for an excuse to interview him; how many people do you know that rode the bus with the Merry Pranksters, edited Lenny Bruce, and claims to have coined the term soft-core pornography?’
19 November 2014
[comics] Steve Ditko Doesn’t Stop: A Guide To 18 Secret Comics By Spider-Man’s Co-Creator … a guide to the the semi-obscure comics that Steve Ditko has produced over the last few years … ‘The Avenging Mind may be a 32-page comic book, but the vast majority of its space is occupied by Ditko’s prose. That’s right. Steve Ditko has a reputation for being an inscrutable recluse, but the hardcore fan knows that he’s published tens of thousands of words’ worth of essay communiques with the outside world. (Plus, he’s in the phone book.) In 2002 a number of these articles were collected into Avenging World, a 240-page codex arcana of words, drawings and comics, all dedicated to detailing the artist’s deepest thoughts on art and life — heavily informed, as you’ve heard, by the works of Objectivist fountainhead Ayn Rand. Avenging World is the Ditko bible. It is not easy reading — due in no small part to Ditko’s determination to isolate, highlight, whittle down, specify his terms in a synonymous manner across strings of repetitive declarations, as if to foreclose on the possibility of ambiguity by stating every possible legitimate variation on a thought. Nevertheless, everything Ditko is “about” is contained therein. And fundamental to Ditko’s worldview is the notion that art should serve not as an idle distraction, or a mirror of its times, but as an active inspiration to the betterment of humankind.’
20 November 2014
[moore] Alan Moore’s Brought To Light On YouTube … Alan Moore performs Brought to Light, his history of the CIA. … ‘This is not a dream.’
21 November 2014
[space] An Astronaut Reveals What Life in Space Is Really Like‘It turns out that once you’re actually in orbit, zero-g has some upsides. Without gravity, bodily fluids move toward your head. It’s a great face-lift. Your stomach gets flat. You feel long, because you grow an inch or two. (I thought, “Oh cool, I’ll be tall,” but of course everybody else was taller too.) But zero-g also has some disadvantages. As that fluid shifts north, you get an enormous headache. Your body compensates and loses about a liter of fluid in the first couple of days—you essentially pee the headache away.’
22 November 2014
[war] Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb … an unbelievable true story with video … ‘They wait. There is a countdown; 18,500 feet above them, the missile is detonated and blows up. Which means, these men intentionally stood directly underneath an exploding 2-kiloton nuclear bomb. One of them, at the key moment (he’s wearing sunglasses), looks up. You have to see this to believe it.’
23 November 2014
[tv] TV Binge Watching Recommendations: November, 2014‘1. House of Cards. 2. Game of Thrones. 3. Breaking Bad. 4.Tie: Sherlock, Homeland.’
24 November 2014
[comics] Canadian cartoonist Seth Interviewed‘I try not to worry too much about meaning with what I’m doing, because I think meaning is accumulated or accrued from just doing it. It builds up its own meaning. I think that might be the bad legacy of modern art, the concern about ‘what does it mean?’ I don’t think that’s important to the artist. The artist kind of knows what it means, but it’s up to other people to determine that.’
25 November 2014
[history] The Very First Written Use of the F Word in English (1528)‘Here the word appears (for the first time if not the last) noted down by hand in the margins of a proper text, in this case Cicero’s De Officiis.’

"Fuckin Abbot"

26 November 2014
[comics] Alan Moore’s Southern Comfort … Pádraig Ó Méalóid post scans of an obscure early Alan Moore comic for 2000AD and explores if it was rewritten … ‘So, decide for yourself: is this the work of the greatest comics writer of our time? Or is it only partially his, or has the art been changed so much from his original script that it has got lost under there?’
27 November 2014
[war] A new report shows nuclear weapons almost detonated in North Carolina in 1961 … Eric Schlosser discusses various nuclear weapon accidents …

The Goldsboro bomb that almost detonated was known as Weapon No. 1. As the plane was spinning and breaking apart, the centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit–and that lanyard was what a crew member would manually pull during wartime to release the bomb. This hydrogen bomb was a machine, a dumb object. It had no idea whether the lanyard was being pulled by a person or by a centrifugal force. Once the lanyard was pulled, the weapon just behaved like it was designed to.

The bomb went through all of its arming steps except for one, and a single switch prevented a full-scale nuclear detonation. That type of switch was later found to be defective. It had failed in dozens of other cases, allowing weapons to be inadvertently armed. And that safety switch could have very easily been circumvented by stray electricity in the B-52 as it was breaking apart. As Secretary of Defense McNamara said, “By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.” That’s literally correct, a short circuit could’ve fully armed the bomb.

28 November 2014
[comics] Demon … check out this compelling new webcomic from Jason Shiga. Recommended.
29 November 2014
[ukip] UKIP warns of Schrödinger’s immigrant who ‘lazes around on benefits whilst simultaneously stealing your job’‘This UKIP fella ‘Schrödinger’ sounds smart, how can I vote for him?’
30 November 2014
[religion] Russell Brand on Religion … Can’t be long before Russell enters his turquoise period