A Poor Imitation of Alan Turing by Christian Caryl | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
These errors are not random; there is a method to the muddle. The filmmakers see their hero above all as a martyr of a homophobic Establishment, and they are determined to lay emphasis on his victimhood.
BBC News – Whistleblower reveals how fraud of Booking.com worked
A whistle-blower has revealed how stolen personal data was used to con thousands of customers of one of the world's biggest hotel booking websites.
The Everything Book: reading in the age of Amazon | The Verge
Chris Green holds an envelope. At least, it looks like an envelope. In reality, it's a piece of office copy paper that's been cut and folded into the shape of a Kindle Voyage, the latest in Amazon's bestselling line of e-readers. Green, the head industrial designer at Lab126, the secret lab where Kindles are designed, unfolds the paper to show it has been stuffed with everything that makes a Kindle: a CPU, a modem, a battery.
Res Obscura: A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404
On September 8, 1404, the Castilian diplomat Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo reached the Silk Road city of Samarkand. He had travelled over five thousand miles by foot, sail, horse and camel; passed through steppe, deserts, seas and mountains. Now he had reached his destination: the capital of a vast new empire created by a military genius, mass murderer and patron of the arts named Timur (meaning “iron” in Persian). De Clavijo’s lord, King Henry III of Castile, had dispatched him to learn more about the man who Europeans called Tamurlane. If possible, he was to forge a peace treaty with the world-conqueror, whose sack of Baghdad alone caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
“Archer” unaired pilot is the most inconceivable episode of “Archer” you could ever imagine… | A Campaign of Shock and Awe
in lieu of drawing and animating the Archer character in every scene they drew a mother-f**ing RAPTOR. Icing the cake of this sweet entertaining terror is the fact that it comes complete with raptor noises. Watching this episode is like watching a collective of people sharing the same imaginary friend.
Embiggening English: The Simpsons and changing language | OxfordWords blog
Meh isn’t in the OED — yet — but don’t expect those who use it to be excited or even interested when it does. The OED. Meh. Meh is an ungrateful word. But, like d’oh, it’s existentially significant. In a Language Log post some years ago, Ben Zimmer noted that meh had so captured the zeitgeist of 2004 that people were not only using it but talking about meh-ness, the condition of meh, a sort of meta meh, as it were, which is so preposterous that, what can you say? Meh. Meh is a perfectly cromulent word.