Thursday afternoon. I’ve renamed a file final_v2_FINAL and I stand by it.

Lorem ipsum is a line of Cicero about pain.

• The placeholder text in every mockup you’ve ever been sent comes from De finibus, a book of philosophy Cicero wrote in 45 BC.
• Somewhere along the way the passage was chopped up, and “dolorem ipsum”, meaning “pain itself”, lost its first syllable.
• Put back together, it says that nobody loves pain for its own sake, but that sometimes toil and pain can bring some great pleasure.
• So every wireframe in your drive is, underneath, a Roman making the case for hard work.

Priceonomics →

The Tim Tam is named after a racehorse.

• In 1958 Ian Norris, a food technologist at Arnott’s, tried the Penguin biscuit on a trip to Britain and came home determined to make a better one.
• That same year the Kentucky Derby was won by a horse called Tim Tam, and Ross Arnott, a keen racegoer, liked the name.
• Getting the biscuit right took another six years, so the Tim Tam didn’t go on sale until 1964.
• When it did, Australia’s favourite biscuit went out under the name of an American racehorse.

Illawarra Mercury →

The first recorded strike was over a late payroll.

• The crew who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived at Deir el-Medina and were paid in grain.
• Around 1157 BC, under Ramesses III, the grain started arriving weeks late.
• So they downed tools and staged a sit-in at the temples, with a message that was hard to argue with: “We are hungry, for 18 days have already elapsed this month.”
• It took several more walkouts before they were paid in full, and a scribe wrote the whole dispute up on what’s now called the Turin Strike Papyrus.

Museo Egizio →

The longer one

The black box nobody wanted

In October 1934 an airliner called Miss Hobart went down in Bass Strait with everyone on board. One of the passengers was the father of a nine-year-old boy called David Warren.

Twenty years later Warren was a fuel scientist at the Aeronautical Research Laboratory in Melbourne, helping to work out why the Comet, the world’s first jet airliner, kept crashing. With no survivors, nobody could say what the crew had seen or said in the final minutes. Warren had just seen one of the first pocket-sized recorders at a trade fair, and his idea was simple: put one in the cockpit. He wrote it up in 1954. His boss told him to get on with blowing up fuel tanks.

So he built it anyway, largely in his own time. By 1958 his Flight Memory Unit could keep four hours of cockpit voice and instrument readings on a loop of steel wire, recording over itself until the moment it stopped.

Then everyone said no. The Department of Civil Aviation said it had “little immediate direct use in civil aircraft”. The RAAF said it “would yield more expletives than explanations”. The pilots’ federation said no plane would take off in Australia “with Big Brother listening”.

What saved it was a lunch. Later in 1958, Sir Robert Hardingham of Britain’s Air Registration Board was visiting the lab and was shown the recorder. As Warren remembered it, “I heard this Pommy voice say ‘I say Coombes, old chap, that’s a damn good idea.’” Warren was soon on his way to London, and a British firm put the design into production.

Back home it took a crash. In June 1960 a TAA Fokker Friendship went into the sea off Mackay, killing all 29 people on board, and the inquiry could never say why. The judge strongly recommended recorders, and in January 1963 Australia became the first country in the world to make them compulsory. Every airliner now carries one. They’re painted orange.

The idea took a year. The approval took eight.

IEEE Spectrum →

Course materials

That’s it. Go home.

Professional Development  ·  sent Thursdays, when it stops mattering
Issue 08