Kiruna: How to Move a Town Two Miles East – BBC
“This spring work will begin to move Sweden’s northernmost town two miles to the east. Over the next 20 years, 20,000 people will move into new homes, built around a new town centre, as a mine gradually swallows the old community. It’s a vast and hugely complicated undertaking.”
Give Me $300 Or the Website Gets It! – The Verge
“”A competitor asked me to perform a DDoS attack on your website. I can stop the attack for $300 USD. Let me know if you are interested in my offer.” Before Heiferman could finish reading the email, the site came under attack, swamped with an 8.2 gigabit attack that took it down almost immediately. It took 24 hours to bring the site back online, and it didn’t stay online for long. The site came up Friday morning, only to go down again Saturday afternoon. It came back Saturday at midnight, then went down again Sunday night. As of press time, they were still struggling to keep the it live.
The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse – the New York Times
“For more than 30 years, he and a few dozen other men with intellectual disabilities — affecting their reasoning and learning — lived in a dot of a place called Atalissa, about 100 miles south of here. Every morning before dawn, they were sent to eviscerate turkeys at a processing plant, in return for food, lodging, the occasional diversion and $65 a month. For more than 30 years.”
The Audacious Rescue Plan That Might Have Saved Space Shuttle Colombia – Ars Technica
“At Mission Control in Houston, the flight controllers monitoring Columbia‘s descent began to notice erratic telemetry readings coming from the shuttle, and then all voice and data contact with the orbiter was lost. Controllers continued to hope that they were merely looking at instrumentation failures, even as evidence mounted that a catastrophic event had taken place. Finally, at 9:12 Eastern Time, re-entry Flight Director LeRoy Cain gave the terrible order that had only been uttered once before, 17 years earlier when Challenger broke apart at launch: “Lock the doors.””
Obama’s Trauma Team – TIME
“This is the story of a team of unknown — except in elite technology circles — coders and troubleshooters who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save the website. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspect, Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn’t work, this ad hoc team rescued it and, arguably, Obama’s chance at a health-reform legacy.”
Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience – the Daily Beast
“You can buy chocolate with “a meld of rich goji berries and ashwagandha root to strengthen your immune system,” and bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” There’s cereal with the kind of ingredients that are “made in a kitchen—not in a lab,” and tea designed to heal the human heart.”
Rich Kids of the Internet: The Astounding Troll-Hole That is Elite Daily – The Awl
“The website Elite Daily is “the premier online destination for aspiring men and women alike.” It is the first true editorial product of the post-sex-tape era. It specializes in two kinds of attention-trawling: Luxurious images of beautiful people doing things that require a lot of money, like looking at each other on yachts and driving along cliffs and also frank and sexist outrage trolling. One article informs the reader, “How To Always Get What You Want,” while another offers “The 10 Signs She’s The Perfect Mistress.” The site’s original slogan was “How much is enough?” The undeclared nouns there were things like money, women, cars, boats, sex.”
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Photo courtesy of Chris Wieland.
