Extenuating Circumstances

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for May 26th from 04:53 to 14:22:

• Manhattanhenge | Hayden Planetarium – What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.
• Make mainframes, not war: how Mad Men sold computers in the 1960s and 1970s | Ars Technica – Sidenote: I can't help but feel that The Verge is doing this kind of journalism better than Ars Technica is now.
• Coming Soon: Jennifer Egan’s "Black Box" : The New Yorker – "The story was originally nearly twice its present length; it took me a year, on and off, to control and calibrate the material into what is now “Black Box.”" – when was the last time you took a year to edit something to publish on Twitter?
• Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" : The New Yorker – The New Yorker's Page-Turner collection of day one of Jennifer Egan's Twitter-based fiction.
• In Lead-Up to Launch, Obvious-Backed Lift Leaves Gamification Behind – Liz Gannes – Product News – AllThingsD – Includes clarification and definition of "naked gamification", i.e. the shit one.