Extenuating Circumstances

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 19th from 10:04 to 13:01:

• The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy | Hacker News – It claims that another star having a close encounter with KIC 8462852 (the star discussed in the article) and stirring up its comet cloud “would be an…
• Police union head calls for boycott of pumpkin patch over ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign – The head of a Fairfax County police union called for a boycott of a popular pumpkin patch because a “Black Lives Matter” sign was displayed in the window of a…
• The Doctor – Tom Catena is the only surgeon for thousands of square miles in southern Sudan. His hospital, and his life, are constantly under threat. There is no end to the…
• An Engineering Theory of the Volkswagen Scandal – The New Yorker – Last week, Volkswagen of America C.E.O. Michael Horn told a House subcommittee investigating his company’s ongoing emissions scandal that it wasn’t a corporate…
• Graphic Artist Michael Bierut on Logos and Emojis – LETTER MAN | Michael Bierut in Pentagram’s New York office “FORTY YEARS AGO, graphic arts were a form of black magic—only a handful of people even knew the…
• Portland Code School owner blames state for school’s sudden closure, considers legal action – Portland Business Journal – spaxiax
  The main investor in Portland Code School is placing the school’s closure squarely on the state and is investigating possible legal action, he said in…
• How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley? – Silicon Valley has always been prone to buzzwords, often annoying and almost always overused. The latest is an exception: diversity. Suddenly, there’s an…
• X-Ray Scans Expose an Ingenious Chip-and-Pin Card Hack – The chip-enabled credit card system long used in Europe, a watered down version of which is rolling out for the first time in America, is meant to create a…
• Dan Hon is typing on Twitter: “Scientists agree: there’s only one explanation for KIC 8462852, and it’s not aliens.

  The new Dyson DC-X. Astronomically powerful suction.” – RT @KIC8462852: How does it fare on 280,000,000,000,000,000 square kilometers of carpet?

• MuckRock • All communications related to April 10, 2015 FOIL by John Krauss – RT @mynameisdom: This is AMAZING. The NYC Dept. of Finance wants to charge $50/hr for all 950 hours of an SQL export. Unbelievable.