Here we are. Another week, another set of articles for you to read and enjoy (or not).

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

'Somebody perhaps decided to test us': How a Norwegian weather rocket almost sparked a nuclear war — Incidents like this, though rare, weren't unknown during the Cold War. But in 1995? It was something I think very few people expected and which showed that the old tensions from only a few years prior lingered.

From the article:

Russia had been sensitive about its air defence capabilities since 1987, when West German teenager Mathias Rust managed to fly more than 500 miles (750km) through every Soviet defensive shield in a single-engine plane to land at the gates of the Kremlin. By now the Cold War was over, but this was a sign that some Russian officials remained jittery about a nuclear threat.

How Markdown took over the world — Who'd have thought that a simple, quick, and dirty way to add formatting to blog posts would come be used as widely and for such a wide range of tasks? While Markdown has its detractors, it's going to be with us for more than a little while.

From the article:

Markdown came along at the right time in the evolution of its medium. You can get people to change their behaviors when they’re using a new tool, or adopting a new technology.

The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age — Thoughts about how our use of technology and, by extension, the algorithms which power that technology mediate and influence our choices and our actions. And we often don't even notice it.

From the article:

This is the real computing revolution. Much of what we do is immediately authenticated as we do it, stored as data, classified or scored on some sort of scale, and deployed in real time to modulate some outcome of interest – usually, the behaviour of a person, or a machine, or an organisation.

The Dream of the Universal Library — Will we ever get a vast, interlinked online corpus of knowledge consisting of all published books? I have my doubts, but this seemingly pie-in-the-sky proposal shows some promise.

From the article:

We don’t have to overhaul copyright law, or parameters of fair use, to solve the problem of access to most digitized books. We do need a practical framework to make them available through new licensing exceptions and governance in cases where they are commercially unavailable.