a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• bugger, maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know much about the world. highly recommended
• lockdown, the coming war on general-purpose computing. recommended
• the billion-dollar space pen, space has its urban legends of course, and the million dollar space pen is one of the more enduring ones: in the 1960s, nasa astronauts discovered that their pens did not work in zero gravity. so like good engineers, they went to work and designed a wonder pen and it only cost a million dollars! the crafty russians used a pencil
• 7 lessons from building a $15-million-a-year lifestyle business with no loans, vcs or angel money, great read, packed with excellent suggestions
• the secret to making money online, great talk by david heinemeier hansson
• 57 startup lessons
• meetings suck, my tips to make your meetings better
• meetup golf, the most helpful people in your network are going to help you not because they expect something in return, but because - get this - they actually like you. so stop trying to make "connections" and "business contacts", and start trying to make friends. you know, like people do. in life
• if programming languages were religions
• "if people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done", ludwig wittgenstein
• ach, südtirol, an essay about being a south tyrolean abroad, full of wanderlust and homesickness (german)
• anti-tank dogs (wikipedia)
• how cold war nuclear testing once made orbit unsafe for apollo
• nsa field station teufelsberg berlin, a late post mortem
• boyan slat, how the oceans can clean themselves
• two special lenses for barry lyndon, how the stringent demands of the purist-perfectionist film-maker kubrick led to the development of two valuable new cinematographic tools
• faked photos of world war 1 aerial combat that really had people fooled
• moop mama, urban brass, awesome munich band
• time is a dimension, photography project by fong qi wei