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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 12 June 2015
[space] Ceres: Weird white spots are still weird. … What are the White Spots on Ceres? … ‘You can bet every penny you have planetary scientists are poring over these images and examining every detail. These bright spots are unique; no other such high-contrast feature is seen on airless, rocky bodies. We know Ceres has a lot of water ice under the surface, so it’s not too far out to think that may be what we’re seeing. A recent impact could’ve dredged up ice (we’ve seen that on Mars, in far smaller craters), splashing it around the crater, and also caused that darker spray. But right in the exact center of that big crater (which is clearly much older)? That seems like a big coincidence. Could it be from some sort of vent?’
11 June 2015
[music] How the compact disc lost its shine … A look at the rise and fall of the CD … ‘The CD was introduced to the British public in a 1981 episode of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, in which Kieran Prendeville mauled a test disc of the Bee Gees’ Living Eyes to demonstrate the format’s alleged indestructibility. It caught the public imagination, but Immink found the claim puzzling and embarrassing because it was clearly untrue. “We should not put emphasis on the fact it will last for ever because it will not last for ever,” he says. “We should put emphasis on the quality of sound and ease of handling.” (Paul McCartney recently recalled the first time George Martin showed him a CD. “George said, ‘This will change the world.’ He told us it was indestructible, you can’t smash it. Look! And – whack – it broke in half.”)’
10 June 2015
[dick] All Richard Nixon, all the time … a tumblr about Richard Nixon … ‘I LIKE DICK’
9 June 2015
[fifa] How a curmudgeonly old reporter exposed the FIFA scandal that toppled Sepp Blatter … some fascinating background on the FIFA scandal … ‘The best way for Americans to imagine Andrew Jennings is to roll Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein together, then add a touch of a Scottish burr and plenty of flannel. Jennings was born in Scotland but moved to London as a child. His grandfather played for a prominent London soccer team, Clapton Orient (now called Leyton Orient), but Jennings had little interest in the sport. He did, however, have a nose for journalism.’
8 June 2015
[politics] The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election … More on the downfall of Ed Miliband … ‘In a car park in Hastings, Miliband unveiled an 8ft 6in slab of limestone, into which had been carved Labour’s six election pledges. The mockery was so intense that the location of the “Ed Stone” became the subject of frenzied media speculation after the election. “The only reason it got through 10 planning meetings was because we were all distracted, looking for a way to punch through on the SNP,” one adviser said.The stone’s demolition, in the event of a Labour loss, had been agreed at the time it was commissioned. After the election, the party drew up two plans for its disposal: one was simply to smash the stone up and throw the rubble onto a scrap heap. The second was to break it up and sell chunks, like the Berlin Wall, to party members as a fundraising effort. The first attempts to destroy the stone had to be postponed when the media tracked its location to a south London warehouse. There are claims it has been destroyed, but even Miliband’s close advisers cannot confirm its fate’
7 June 2015
[comics] 36 Things That Will Always Happen At A Comic Convention … ’14. Someone will ask a question at a Q&A that’s actually just a long story about themselves and the answer will be silence.’
6 June 2015
[games] Behind a pizza-slice smile: the dark side of Pac-Man… a look at Pac-man’s dark heart … ‘Researcher Alex Wade draws comparisons between Pac-Man’s inescapable maze and the Labyrinths imagined by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges – the exits are just entrances to other parts of the whole. Similarly, comic writer Zach Weiner, has pictured the game as a sort of terrifying Kafka-esque nightmare, in which a man wakes up to find he has been reduced to a living mouth that must consume to survive. This ties in with another interpretation of Pac-Man as the ultimate modern shopper, trapped in a cycle of meaningless consumption and endless binging on electronic treats in a sterile technological landscape. “He is the pure consumer,” wrote Poole in Trigger Happy.’
5 June 2015
[war] Letters of Note: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade… Eisenhower’s Order of the Day On June 5th, 1944 … ‘Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.’
4 June 2015
[life] Highlights From The Guardian’s Soulmates Dating Site… ‘I have simple tastes – I want a man who enjoys cross training on Hampstead Heath, Kurdish folk music retrospectives at the Barbican and the ability to quote every Polly Toynbee column from the last 18 months.’
3 June 2015
[comics] How Vincent D’Onofrio Became the Best New Villain on TV … D’Onofrio discusses playing Kingpin in Netflix’s Daredevil … ‘Vincent D’Onofrio had a ritual he went through every time he needed to get into the mindset of Wilson Fisk, the all-powerful, ultra-evil mobster he plays on Netflix’s hit series Daredevil. The 55-year-old actor would go someplace quiet, pull out his smartphone and stare at paintings of the character from Marvel’s latter-day Daredevil comics. “The way they drew him”‰.”‰.”‰.”‰it wasn’t just that he was this imposing, kind of massive guy,” says D’Onofrio. “He looked broken. That was the key.”‘
2 June 2015
[comics] Daniel Clowes Hasn’t Forgiven Shia LaBeouf … a recent interview with Dan Clowes … ‘Q: With the superhero-movie explosion in full force, what do you think Dan Pussey would be up to today? A: You know, it’s funny, ’cause in that one story I did, “The Death of Dan Pussey,” it takes him into the future, where comic books are completely forgotten. But you know what? He’d be king of the world right now. This is his era.’
1 June 2015
[tech] Someone Tried to Mine Bitcoin on a 1960s Punchcard Computer … Unsurprisingly, retro-computing and Bitcoins don’t mix … ‘He wrote out code for running the algorithm on 85 executable assembly punch cards, put the cards into the computer (manually), and fired her up. It started solving an old hash from a successfully mined block of Bitcoin-very, very slowly. “To mine a block at current difficulty, the IBM 1401 would take about 5×10^14 years (about 40,000 times the current age of the universe). The electricity would cost about 10^18 dollars. And you’d get 25 bitcoins worth about $6000,” he wrote.’
31 May 2015
[comics] Annotations for Providence #1 … notes on Alan Moore and Jaycen Burrow’s latest comic … ‘Page 17, Panel 3: “The Repairer of Reputations” in The King in Yellow is set in an alternate future New York in the 1920s, which featured legalized suicide chambers and a concluded European war with an American victory; this further reinforces the layered fictionality of Providence, where the reality of the comic book is not our reality, nor even Lovecraft’s.’
30 May 2015
[movies] Most of Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances …
29 May 2015
[london] London’s Most Mysterious Mansion … some detective work on who owns London’s largest mansion … ‘Beneath the forecourt, in front of the main house, the new owners have built what amounts to an underground village-a basement of more than forty thousand square feet. (The largest residential property in Manhattan is said to be a fifty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion, on East Seventy-first Street between Madison and Fifth, owned by Jeffrey Epstein.) This basement, which is connected to the Orangery, includes a seventy-foot-long swimming pool, a cinema with a mezzanine, massage rooms, a sauna, a gym, staff quarters, and parking spaces for twenty-five cars. In late 2013, the local council approved plans for a second basement, beneath the gatehouse, which will connect that building to both the main house and the Orangery. Earlier this year, the owners also sought planning permission to extend an underground “servants’ passage.” When the refurbishment is complete, Witanhurst will have about ninety thousand square feet of interior space, making it the second-largest mansion in the city, after Buckingham Palace. It will likely become the most expensive house in London.’
28 May 2015
[kubrick] The 10 Most Outrageous Theories About What The Shining Really Means … ‘Stuart Ullman’s Paper Tray is Trying to Have Sex with the Audience – Top-notch conspiracy hunter Jay Weidner has many, many theories about the work of Kubrick (and other things) but some of the more eye-popping are his thoughts about how the director used the subliminal messaging of advertisers in his films. To wit: In the scene where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) meets Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) in his office and, Weidner says in 237, his hips line-up perfectly with his paper try making it look like an erection.’
27 May 2015
[comics] Does Wally Wood Deserve a Creator Credit on Netflix’s “Daredevil”? … I’m no expert on early Daredevil but it sounds like he does deserve credit … ‘No one is more important to ”ª”ŽDaredevil”¬ than Wallace “Wally” Wood! After leaving his historic 12-year hit run on MAD Magazine, in 1964, Wood took over the then foundering, near-cancellation fledgling Daredevil comic after issue #4. Wood created the RED Daredevil character design, the interlocking double-D logo (which inspired the nickname “DD”), developed the visualization of the Radar Sense, created the grappling-hook cane/Billy-club cable, technological enhancements to DD’s senses, themes used through the Frank Miller run, and beyond. Lee and Everett are acknowledged at the opening of the Netflix-Marvel series and many more comic-book talents are thanked in the ”ª”ŽNetflix”¬ Daredevil show but not “Kid Daredevil Himself, Wally Wood” as Marvel sometimes called him!’
26 May 2015
[death] The most insane deaths seen by an NYC medical examiner … fascinating overview of the career of a Medical Examiner in New York …‘When Judy Melinek was considering where to begin her career as a medical examiner – New York or LA? – she was given great advice. “If you really want to learn forensic pathology, do a rotation in New York City,” her chief resident said. “All kinds of great ways to die there.” Including, but not limited to: plummeting down a manhole, attack by egg-roll machine, miscalculating the tensile strength of cable cord and scaffolding collapse. In Melinek’s first week on the job, the tone became clear. As one novice began describing the case of “a man who was shot by a lady,” Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Seymour Hirsch corrected him. “Shot by a woman,” Hirsch said. “Ladies don’t shoot people.” And so began Dr. Judy MelÂinek’s education in life and death in New York City…’
25 May 2015
[kubrick] Stanley Kubrick’s Keys To The Shining … going far too deep on Kubrick’s The Shining and a conspiracy / cover-up by NASA … ‘Stanley Kubrick embedded the Narrative of a Murder in this Film. I believe it was His wish that it be found – by his Audience. I’m motivated to share this Narrative here, because ultimately it contains information that is profoundly pertinent – to All of Us.’
24 May 2015
[tech] Executor 2.0 for MS-DOS … Check out this Mac Emulator running on MS-DOS within a Javascript Emulator.
23 May 2015
[music] CIA Allegedly Behind 1980s Club Hit About Sleeping Dominatrix … a true story that reads like something James Ellroy might write if he wrote about the Seventies … ‘In 1978, the CIA was caught up in a BDSM Cold War affair. A potential Soviet asset had fallen for a professional dominatrix who made decent money peeing on entertainment lawyers. Also in play was Mary Tyler Moore’s landscaper, merely because he was sweet on the dominatrix and her record collection. The most actionable intelligence from these black leather ops would not be obtained by the Agency, but by the landscaper himself, Stuart Argabright. Under the alias Dominatrix, Argabright recorded “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” a New York club hit released in 1984…’ [via jzw]
22 May 2015
[wikipedia] Death means a lot of bureaucracy on Wikipedia … ‘When someone dies, on their Wikipedia article a diligent editor is supposed to update the following things…’
21 May 2015
[batman] The True Creator of Batman Never Got Credit, and Now His Granddaughter Fights to Correct History … the story of Batman’s co-creator Bill Finger and his grand-daughter Athena … ‘In part, it was the character’s global reach that inspired Marc Tyler Nobleman to research the creator who’d been sidelined. “I saw that he never had a book to himself, and it just seemed like a gross cultural injustice,” says Nobleman, who began his work in the early 2000s. Nobleman, who had previously written a book on Superman’s creators, dug through high school yearbooks, fanzines, and death certificates. He had assumed Finger had no living heir. Then one day in 2007, Nobleman spoke to a nephew of Bill’s who suggested he talk to the writer’s granddaughter. “I said, ‘He doesn’t have a granddaughter. His son Fred was gay and died in ’92 without children,’ as if I’d know better than the family,” Nobleman recalls. The nephew didn’t recall Fred’s daughter’s name but passed Nobleman off to other kin. Eventually, Nobleman learned her name was Athena Finger. He then landed on her MySpace page. “The first thing I saw was a picture of a dog whose name was Bruce Wayne,” Nobleman says.’
20 May 2015
[movies] Surely you can’t be serious: An oral history of Airplane! … the creators of Airplace look back at the creation of the classic comedy movie …
Jim Abrahams: I always felt that part of what made it so endearing to have those guys in the movie was that everyone knew that [Robert] Stack and [Lloyd] Bridges and Leslie [Nielsen] and Peter Graves were having a laugh at the expense of their own images. That kind of self-effacing humor is endearing, and as we reflect on Airplane! and the fact that it’s lived so long, I think that’s part of the reason why: It’s not really mean-spirited, it’s actually sort of sweet. 19 May 2015
[people] Kay Burley becomes self-aware … surprising news about the Sky News journalist and news anchor … ‘Burley, who on 9/11 reported that the entire eastern seaboard of the USA had been decimated by a terrorist attack, apparently recognised herself as a human being, separate from the environment and other individuals, and capable of introspection, after five hours of belligerently trying to interview “that sour-faced woman in the mirror”. Self-awareness usually begins in humans at the age of 18 months when toddlers recognise their own reflections.’
18 May 2015
17 May 2015
[funny] Nick Clegg to become masked vigilante ‘the Liberal Democrat’ … senses-shattering news from News Thump …
When asked how he intended to fund the expensive life of a costumed avenger, it was pointed out that Parliamentary expenses are ‘surprisingly flexible’. 16 May 2015
[science] Forget Fingerprints-in the Future We’ll Be Identified by Gut Bacteria … a future plot to CSI: Vegas? … ‘Compared to microbes in the skin, mouth, and vagina, gut microbes were the most stable over time, according to the researchers. Around 86 percent of the time, the scientists were able to uniquely identify an individual based on stool samples taken 30 to 300 days after the original stool sample from which the microbial fingerprint was derived. With bacteria in the skin, mouth, and vagina, later fingerprints matched the original ones about 30 percent of the time.’
15 May 2015
[politics] Inside the Milibunker: the last days of Ed … the inside story on Milliband’s downfall … ‘Another Labour insider told of the scene in the press office when Miliband posed with the notorious Ed stone, the 8ft 6in slab of limestone upon which his six key election pledges were inscribed. When it appeared on TV, a press officer ‘started screaming. He stood in the office, just screaming over and over again at the screen. It was so bad they thought he was having a breakdown.”
14 May 2015
[comics] Jon Hamm as Superman by Phil Noto …
13 May 2015
[herzog] Werner Herzog’s memoir Of Walking in Ice, reviewed … a book about that time Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris to visit a friend’s deathbed …
The voice too is the one we know so well from the films and summons the familiar face: lugubrious, disheveled, and beetle-browed, perennially squinting as though against the blinding light of the universe’s final catastrophe. No detail is too small to depress him: “The teenagers on their mopeds are moving toward death in synchronized motion,” he glumly writes. “I think of unharvested turnips but, by God, there are no unharvested turnips around.” 12 May 2015
[politics] Did 1000 People Decide The Outcome Of The General Election? … some analysis of the result of the General Election from Diamond Geezer … ‘The fact remains that there are fewer than 1000 people out there on whose choice the outcome of this election hinged. If you changed your mind in Gower, Croydon Central or Bury North, one of those people could be you. Thank goodness nobody knew who you were before the polls opened, otherwise you’d never have been left alone.’
11 May 2015
[space] How Spaceships Die … a look at how satellites and space probes end their working lives … ‘Every craft that we’ve ever sent to another planet is still there, to a greater or lesser extent. Twenty-one objects on Venus, 13 on Mars (including nine landers/rovers) and a startling 76 different lunar craft are all slowly decaying in their new homeworlds, not to mention the Huygens probe on Titan, Shoemaker on the asteroid Eros, Hayabusa on the asteroid 25143 Itkowa and the Philae lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimnko. In total, there are over 476,000 pounds of Earth objects in alien worlds.’
10 May 2015
[weirdscience] Radio 4 in Four: Robin Ince explores hollow earth… go listen to this clip of Robin Ince on Hollow Earth theory (guest-starring Alan Moore).
9 May 2015
[fractals] Web Mandlebrot … nicely done web-based Mandelbrot generator. [via Kottke]
8 May 2015
[tech] Conversation With a Tech Support Scammer … fascinating transcripts of how a tech support scam happens … ‘“Take a look down here. See where it says processes?” he prompted. “That’s the problem. That’s why you’re getting the message popping-up. You see right here at the bottom?”
“46 processes? So that’s 6 more than normal?” I asked.
“Yes, right. What this means is, your computer is doing 46 different things at the moment,” he explained.’
7 May 2015
[politics] Scarfolk Council: “Watch Out! There’s a Politician About” … Election week posters from Scarfolk … ‘Just before the Scarfolk election of 1975 the ruling party was keen to permanently eradicate all political opposition and set out to smear what it called a ‘hazardous surplus of politicians and others suffering from civic delusional disorders’. The incumbent’s aim was to bring about a state of emergency that would permit a legal postponement of the election, a postponement that could, in theory, become indefinite. The smear campaigns knew no bounds as one politician after another was exposed for corruption, sexual and moral improprieties, and poor table manners…’
6 May 2015
[comics] Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence … annotations for Alan Moore and Jaycen Burrows not yet released Providence comic.
5 May 2015
[life] Quite possibly the greatest Internet comment ever… posted by VoteUKIPforTheKids on a Guardian article on Steve Strange.
These guys were Bohemians? Don’t make me laugh. Do you know where the most bohemian place in this country is – The Church of England! 4 May 2015
[comics] ‘Beano’ reveals Dennis The Menace’s father is actually 1980s Dennis … ‘In the most recent issue of The Beano, it is confirmed for the first time that Dennis’s dad is a grown-up version of the 1980s-era Dennis The Menace. While you may remember Dennis The Menace’s dad in his older, balder, Hitler moustache-sporting incarnation, the comic made a historic shift on 25 August 2012 by introducing a spikey-haired new ‘dad’. The comic also shifted the father-son relationship from its painfully old-fashioned combative (even abusive) tone, to one that was sometimes adversarial, but also friendlier.’
3 May 2015
2 May 2015
[web] Inventing Favicon.ico… the story of how the Favicon was created at Microsoft … ‘I still remember telling my friend Michael Radwin at Yahoo about favicon.ico. He was looking at Yapache logs for fun as he does, and he had noticed an unusual spike in HTTP requests for http://www.yahoo.com/favicon.ico. He said, what the hell is favicon.ico? And I explained it to him. He was so excited that he slammed a favicon.ico onto the server, which might have been one of the first official favicons in existence.’
1 May 2015
[comics] The Best Superman Stories Not Actually About Superman … interesting list of Superman-alike comics to watch out for … ‘Alan Moore’s Supreme was the Silver Age Superman thrown into a blender and it was awesome. I’m listing all of the issues because all of the issues are good: the opening issues, “The Supreme Story of the Year,” all about Supreme being ‘rebooted’ and finding the Supremacy, the place outside time where all previous Supremes live, to the issues where Supreme’s villains escape from the “Hell of Mirrors” and the Televillain kills Monica from Friends (literally), to the issue near the end that is a complete homage to all things Jack Kirby. It’s Alan Moore making Silver Age goodness.’
30 April 2015
[crime] Anatomy of a Hijack … The story of an attempt to fraudulently commandeer a phone and bank account … ‘Check the online banking – I can’t get in. So I call the bank and get immediately routed through to the fraud department and go through an unusually large amount of security. They inform me that yes, something strange is happening, and did I by any chance recently make a large transfer out of my retirement savings? Er, NO.’
29 April 2015
[politics] 15 Malcolm Tucker Quotes That Perfectly Explain The 2015 Election … ‘You Look Like You've Shat A Lego Garage.’ …
28 April 2015
[health] Yes, You Can Catch Insanity: Reviving the debate about the immune system and mental illness. … a look at the connections between the immune system, inflammation and mental health … ‘Nothing cemented the link between body and brain quite like syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. Before antibiotics, a syphilis infection could be a slow-motion death sentence. In addition to ravaging the body, late-stage syphilis victims often escalated into what doctors at the time called neurosyphilis, a sort of manic, delusional state, before edging over into paralysis and death. It was a clear, common case of an infection causing psychosis.Syphilis was so common it was called “the disease of the century.” Most patients were middle-class men; according to one estimate, 10 percent of patients in turn-of-the-century asylums were there because of neurosyphilis.’
27 April 2015
[politics] Bye Bye Labour … a depressing look at Labour’s position approaching the General Election … ‘Labour has accepted Conservative precepts. The private sector knows, and grows, best. The City is untouchable: it may be chastised, but never seriously confronted. Unemployment is a form of dependency, best dealt with through market discipline. Competition is the law of all social and economic life, and it is the role of the state to encourage it and to secure public participation in it. And the British state, and its military commitments, are sacrosanct. In the months leading up to the Scottish independence referendum – the sole recent instance of mass, enthusiastic democratic participation in the UK – Labour found itself campaigning alongside the Conservatives, with the result that in May’s election it will be all but wiped out north of the border. The logic of its position has compelled Labour to attack the SNP far more vehemently than it has the Conservatives. Miliband has been forced, under Tory pressure, to rule out a post-election coalition with the SNP, which may be enough to end any prospect of a viable Labour government.’
26 April 2015
[web] The Failed Promise of Deep Links… a depressing look at how deep linking is becoming an idea for mobiles rather than the Open Web … ‘With mobile’s deep links, everyone seems to have collectively wiped the buzzword slate clean and started fresh – no context, no memory. No depth. It’s as if someone started a new comedy act today and called it “Monty Python” without offering any sign of knowing the name had a history. This cluelessness is extra-ironic because, originally, the exact purpose of links was to make this kind of connection clear. The people who invented the link saw it as a tool for relating ideas in illuminating ways – for making conceptual leaps and connecting disparate thoughts. If these visionaries had achieved their aim, the kind of tech-cultural amnesia represented by the recycling of the term “deep links” shouldn’t have been possible, two decades into the Web era. The links with true depth that they envisioned would have made sure of that.’
25 April 2015
[comics] Review of the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Trailer … from Andrew Rilstone … ‘Dark Batman is more interesting than the silly Batman (who never quite existed outside of the KAPOW television series). Dark Batman is more in keeping with the basic premise of a character built of rage. But just because Dark Batman is cool is does not follow that Dark Superman and Dark Spider-Man and Dark Paddington Bear would be equally cool. The darker the dark character is the more he needs a bright character character to stand next to. And the brighter the bright characters the darker and cooler the dark, cool one will look. (This is the point of Robin.)’
24 April 2015
[space] That Time the US Accidentally Nuked Britain’s First Satellite … a fascinating, forgotten fragment of space history … ‘On July 9, 1962, mere weeks after Ariel-1 was put into orbit and had successfully begun transmitting data about the ionosphere back to Earth, British scientists were shocked when the sensors aboard Ariel-1 designed to measure radiation levels suddenly began to give wildly high readings. Initially, they assumed that the satellite’s instruments had failed or were otherwise just malfunctioning. As it turned out, as Ariel-1 was happily free-falling around the Earth, the US military had decided to detonate an experimental 1.4 megaton nuclear weapon named Starfish-Prime in the upper atmosphere…’
23 April 2015
[election] UKIP Royston Vasey Local Election Leaflet … via their Twitter account … ‘We only accept local people in the local party.’
22 April 2015
[google] What does Google need on mobile? … a look at Google’s mobile strategy from Benedict Evans… ‘Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity – a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home – to one of perfect complexity – every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other hand, no-one knows water like Google. No-one else has the same lead in building understanding of how to deal with this. Hence, I think, one should think of every app, service, drive and platform from Google not so much as channels that might conflict but as varying end-points to a unified underlying strategy, which one might characterize as ‘know a lot about how to know a lot’.’
21 April 2015
[apollo] 45 years after Apollo 13: Ars looks at what went wrong and why… Ars Technica on what caused the explosion on Apollo 13? … ‘For Apollo 13, keeping calm and working the problems as they appeared allowed three astronauts to escape unharmed from a complex failure. The NASA mindset of simulate, simulate, simulate meant that when things did go wrong, even something of the magnitude of the Apollo 13 explosion, there was always some kind of contingency plan worked out in advance. Controllers had a good gut-level feel for the limits of the spacecraft’s systems when trying to work through emergency problems.’
20 April 2015
[web] HTTP Error 447: Gone until I get the attention I deserve … a new type of HTTP error … ‘The 447 response is primarily intended to assist the task of ego maintenance by notifying the recipient that the resource is intentionally but temporarily unavailable and that the server owners desire that people pay more attention to them. Such an event is common for resources belonging to emotionally unstable individuals when they feel the world is no longer going their way. ‘
19 April 2015
[beards] Men seeking plausible beard exit strategies … as reported by the Daily Mash … ’28-year-old Wayne Hayes said: “Mine got stuck in a door, it was a case of pull it out by the roots or starve to death. “As an unreconstructed alpha male who doesn’t give a shit about media-driven style trends and is basically a raw sexy ape I chose the former but purely for survival reasons. “Then I applied moisturiser to the affected area.”’
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