How can it be November already?

Must be all that Halloween candy, it affected my brain somehow...

• The Window, the Patch, & the Artifact

  Earhart and Noonan departed Miami for San Juan, Puerto Rico early on the morning of Tuesday, June 1, 1937. A Miami Herald photo of the plane taxiing out for takeoff shows that some time between whenever the photo with Nilla Putnam was taken on Saturday and the departure for San Juan on Tuesday, the window had been replaced by a shiny aluminum patch.

• Why the Chess Computer Deep Blue Played Like a Human

  The extent to which these results speak to human analogizing is unclear. But they open the possibility that our process of analogy making may be even less rational and more stochastic than we suspect, and that the deep archetypes we match against in our brain might bear far less relationship to reality than we might think. Underneath our apparent rationality may lie neurobiological processes that look considerably closer to random trial and error. In this view, human creativity and randomness go hand in hand.

• Pro Git, 2nd Edition

  Written by Git pros Scott Chacon and Ben Straub, Pro Git (Second Edition) builds on the hugely successful first edition, and is now fully updated for Git version 2.0, as well as including an indispensable chapter on GitHub. It’s the best book for all your Git needs.

• Writing Reviewable Code

  This document describes a strategy for structuring changes used successfully at Facebook and in Phabricator.

• The ASF @ 15 -- Chairman's Statement

  Apache has seen amazing success over the last 15 years. Not only do ASF projects impact almost every area of computing, but the Apache License, our Contributor License Agreements (CLAs), and our pattern of open, collaborative development (often known as "The Apache Way") continue to influence Open Source projects outside of the ASF.

• Wolf Wars

  In February, after the Lost Creek pack loped past the border of Yukon–Charley, state biologists shot all 11 wolves from a helicopter, wiping out 20 years of research in a single day. Had it been a few years earlier, the state agents charged with predator control would’ve seen Burch’s radio collars and spared at least some of the Lost Creek pack. But no longer, Burch says: “There’s no negotiations anymore. They kill almost all the wolves they can find. These last two winters they’ve pretty well gotten most of them.”

• Conference writeups, HotNets 2014