[terrorism] Did Ken Dornstein Solve the Lockerbie Bombing? … The engrossing story of one man’s attempt to resolve who murdered his brother on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie …

Dornstein ushered me up to the third floor, where two cramped rooms were devoted to Lockerbie. In one room, shelves were lined with books about espionage, aviation, terrorism, and the Middle East. Jumbo binders housed decades of research. In the other room, Dornstein had papered the walls with mug shots of Libyan suspects. Between the two rooms was a large map of Lockerbie, with hundreds of colored pushpins indicating where the bodies had fallen. He showed me a cluster where first-class passengers landed, and another where most economy passengers were found. Like the coroner in a police procedural, Dornstein derives such clinical satisfaction from his work that he can narrate the grisliest findings with cheerful detachment. Motioning at a scattering of pushpins some distance from the rest, he said, “They were the youngest, smallest children. If you look at the physics of it, they were carried by the wind.”

[london] Did the tube strike improve London’s economy? … ‘Do tube strikes cost the economy millions of pounds in lost productivity, or do they shake up people and change behaviour in a way that offsets the loss? That’s indirectly, a question that has been asked by a group of researchers who took advantage of the tube strike to test a difficult to test idea, known as the Porter-hypothesis Porter argued that – when information is imperfect – externally imposed forced experimentation can help people discover unexpected improvements in efficiency.’

[comics] Wertham was right: Batman decided it was time to teach Robin about the facts of life…

[life] A moment that changed me – my husband fell in love with a bonobo … ‘He was helpless against Malou. His legs carried him without him even knowing to her shady abode several times a day, where she would fling her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and he would whisper secrets that would have her panting with laughter, and it was all just nauseating. All the more so because Malou had quickly figured out that I was the other woman, and spent her days trying to ruin me. She covered me in poop. She devastated my hair. After every encounter with her, I looked like the forest ape.’

[internet] Nihilistic Password Security Questions … ‘What is the maiden name of your father’s mistress?’

[movies] At Last, the Great Martian Movie … a look at Martian Movies… ‘Maybe the best reason to anticipate more excellent Mars movies is the planet’s pull on something deep within us. Having emerged from our myths, it still feeds our fantasies. It’s the most interesting motif left in archetypal dreams of escape and adventure in strange, vast realms, of human rejuvenation and transcendence through exodus and hardship.’

[books] ‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness … a look back Kit Williams’ Masquerade and how the book and treasure hunt caused a huge outbreak of apophenia … ‘Masquerade sold two million copies in the first few years, and readers went mad-sometimes literally-trying to suss out the location of the golden hare. Based on hunches, resonances, illusory references, coincidental results from imagined codes, and genuine mistakes, “Masqueraders” dug up acres of countryside, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, wrote tens of thousands of letters to Williams, and occasionally got stuck halfway up cliffs or were apprehended by police while trespassing on historic properties. Masquerade’s simple, elegant puzzle was couched in a lush landscape of visual symbolism and wordplay, and as it turns out, there’s no better way to distract people from a genuine plan than by concealing it inside a bunch of random noise. Given enough unrelated, unnecessary information, human brains will construct the decoy patterns all by themselves.’

[tv] A Young Hunter S. Thompson Appears on the Classic TV Game Show, To Tell the Truth (1967) …

[comics] Moorecraftian Timeline … a timeline for the H.P. Lovecraft inspired comics from Alan Moore and Jaycen Burrows … ‘1914-1918 – World War I, known to the Parish of Saint Jude in Salem, Massachusetts as “The Great Dry Cull.”’

[tv] David Cronenberg to direct nightmarish final Downton Abbey … ‘Cronenberg is on board and it’s going to be like The Fly meets Videodrome and Naked Lunch but with tweed and better grammar. The Crawleys get a new labrador which turns out to be infected by an alien parasite that mutates all the staff into tentacled maniacs. Mrs Patmore buys a wireless that tells her to kill everyone, and grows a vagina-like orifice on her forehead before serving up a broth made of human body parts.’

[web] God Tier: Facebook moms run the meme game … a look at the rise and fall of the Image Macro … ‘Post-memes seem targeted at parents, Christians, and conservatives. Again, this is just the core audience. But many expressions are unexplored in post-memes. A Minion”Š-”Šor Garfield or Tweety or Snoopy”Š-”Šnever means “I’m cooler than you.” It never supports the young against the old. It never seeks to upset the status quo. It is never sexual. And it is never truly weird. Until it is.’

[headlines] Evening Standard Billboard Flashback: October 2005 …

[mp3] Learning to Love Low Bit Rates … on the experience of listening to low quality MP3’s … ‘The underwater compression of a low-quality mp3 is our generation’s vinyl crackle or skipping CD. It’s a limitation of technology that defines the experience of an era.’

[movies] In Cold Blood: why isn’t the movie of Capote’s bestseller a masterpiece? … looking back at the film version of In Cold Blood … ‘All of In Cold Blood’s virtues are encapsulated in that opening: the black-and-white camerawork of cinematographer Conrad Hall; the music of Jones; and the performance of Robert Blake. Hall’s work draws on news-footage aesthetics, achieving a true-crime tabloid griminess that evokes photographers such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Jones sonically anchors his two killers (Smith and Richard “Dick” Hickock, played by Scott Wilson) with unnerving twinned acoustic basses and found sounds. And Robert Blake is Robert Blake, in the keynote performance of his career.’

[life] Goldfish’s attention span now better than yours … unsurprising news from The Daily Mash … ‘Professor Henry Brubaker said: “The goldfish has sufficient concentration ability to swim up from the bottom of its bowl and grab a food pellet from the surface of the water. “You couldn’t do that. You’d get halfway there and be like – oh, the internet. I’d better check some message type thing, buy some trousers or look at a pornographic video. “So you’d stop to do that, then end up looking a dozen other things of equally poor quality, then have lost all recollection of your original objective.”’