Bit late today; I've been busy getting annoyed with the useless UK Mail delivery company, who apparently kept a parcel with a book I've been waiting several months for in a corner of their depot for two weeks, then sent it back to the publisher 
Bonus foody link: norrahe's been at the chutney spoon again
Happy invoicing!
- Dancing in the dark redux: Recent Russian rendezvous and proximity operations in space - Russian satellites are dancing around each other; but why? ”This article reviews the publicly available information on all four of these recent Russian launches, and attempts to shed some light on why these particular RPO [rendezvous and proximity operations] activities have created concerns. It documents the timeline of what we know about the Russian RPO activities, drawing on open source analysis from the hobbyist satellite observer community, and compares the Russian RPO activities to similar American and Chinese RPO activities."
- Godchecker - Need something to worship? This site has you covered: ”Our legendary mythology encyclopedia now includes nearly four thousand weird and wonderful Gods, Supreme Beings, Demons, Spirits and Fabulous Beasts from all over the world. Explore ancient legends and folklore, and discover Gods of everything from Fertility to Fluff.”
- Computer History Museum Archive - HT to Zeity for this one, which doesn’t bother with anything more advanced than the web server’s default directory listings but contains a plethora of information, interviews, and such about the development of every aspect of the computer industry, such as this conversation about the development of floppy drives: ”Nobody knew Steve Jobs and he was a mess. He had holes in his pants, he looked like a wreck, okay?”… “After that, the following Wednesday or so, Don came to my office and said, "There's a bum in the lobby." <laughter> "And, in marketing, you're in charge of cleaning up the lobby. Would you get the bum out of the lobby." So I went out to the lobby and this guy is sitting there with holes in both knees. He really needed a shower in a bad way but he had the most dark, intense eyes and he said, "I've got this thing we can build" and…”
- Project Get Out And Walk - "Project Get Out and Walk is dedicated to the compilation of a comprehensive, illustrated chronicle of assisted aviation escape systems and the people associated with them. To ensure historical accuracy and verify details the author of this site has researched for over three decades all aspects of aircrew escape from the earliest parachutes and encapsulated systems to ejection seats ." Sadly, Mike Benshar’s wife passed away a year ago and the site hasn’t been updated since, but it still tells you more than you ever thought possible about getting out of a plane early.
- The Comics Curmudgeon - Every day, Josh Fruhlinger is resolutely unimpressed by the comic strips in the newspaper: ”The fact that Dick Tracy’s Neo-Chicago is apparently in the grip of a multi-week crime wave ought to be proof to anyone that brutal, civil-liberties-violating law enforcement doesn’t actually improve public safety.”
- The Mutant Genes Behind the Black Death - ”Researchers are beginning to reveal a surprising genetic history of the plague. A rash of discoveries show how just a small handful of genetic changes — an altered protein here, a mutated gene there — can transform a relatively innocuous stomach bug into a pandemic capable of killing off a large fraction of a continent.” How the evolution of Yersinia pestis is being uncovered by genetic analysis.
- OldNYC - The New York Public Library Picture Collection appeared in Monday Links XXIII back in 2010; now Dan Vanderkam has put the photos on a map: ”The creators of this site associated latitudes and longitudes to the images in the Milstein collection. This process is known as geocoding. Doing this allows the images to be placed at points on a map, which enables new ways of exploring this collection. They also detected individual photos on the original Milstein scans and extracted them. This reduced the appearance of large borders or multiple small images.” Follow the “About” link for links to blog posts explaining the engineering behind the project.
- Most Extravagant Bus Ever Built - "When we are considering which bus design could be called "the strangest ever built in history", then this hyperfuturistic double-decker bus certainly comes right on top." Possibly not a question you’d ever considered before now, but here it is: the Citroen U55 Cityrama Currus
- The History of Sanitary Sewers - A plethora of information about sewers: ”Over the past twenty years, Jon Schladweiler, the Historian of the AZ Water Association, has researched and collected materials related to the history of sewage conveyance systems. Many of these have been displayed in a traveling exhibit entitled “The Sewer History Exhibit” The overall collection of sewer history materials covers the era from approximately 3500 BCE through the 1930s CE. The purpose of this website is to house this dynamic collection of materials about the evolutionary development of sewers over the past 5500 years, and to provide a location for the sharing and distribution of information to others.”
- The white man in that photo - The story of Peter Norman, the other medallist in the famous photo of John Carlos and Tommie Smith giving the Black Power salute at the 1968 Tokyo Olympics: ”It’s a historic photo of two men of color. For this reason I never really paid attention to the other man, white, like me, motionless on the second step of the medal podium. I considered him a random presence, an extra in Carlos and Smith’s moment, or a kind of intruder. Actually, I even thought that that guy – who seemed to be just a simpering Englishman – represented, in his icy immobility, the will to resist the change that Smith and Carlos were invoking in their silent protest. But I was wrong.”
Bonus foody link: norrahe's been at the chutney spoon again
Happy invoicing!
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