This week: correct numbering, with thanks to Scourer
Happy invoicing!
- The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1 - ”The week of April Fools’ Day of 1981 began badly. That Sunday night my husband told me he was leaving me. He had fallen in love with one of his graduate students, and they were headed back to the tropics the next day… They opened the door of her room, and it was eighteen inches deep of just chaos. The bed had been pulled apart, curtains pulled down, drawers all dumped out. Emily - five and three-quarters - looked at Officer Rodriguez and said, ‘I can’t tell if the burglars were in here or not.’ And Officer Rodriguez, to his eternal credit, did not crack a smile.” Dr Mary-Claire King, among numerous other accomplishments, was the first to prove that a specific gene was involved in many cases of breast cancer. You might think that the headline on this story about a turbulent week at the outset of her career gives away the plot, but believe me, there’s more
- This Is the Ideal Number of Hours to Work a Day, According to Decades of Science - "An 8-hour workday only make sense if you're screwing in widgets on an assembly line." And it’s not more than eight, either. In fact, it lines up with what I would have said is just about reasonable.
- The 10 worst Britons in history - Unsurprisingly, many of the people in this list can best be characterised in modern terms as “politicians”: ”The rogue’s gallery includes some famous, and not so famous (or infamous) names: there’s a king, a prime minister and (somewhat surprisingly) a couple of churchmen.”
- Here's how to shock a millennial - Richard Glover recounts some of the formerly common practices in workplaces that young people can’t even: ”My ballpoint pen stopped working in the middle of a meeting last week… In the 1980s, when I first joined the workforce, having an empty ballpoint pen was a necessary step to earning a new one. There would be a designated person in the office to whom you would present the empty device. They'd check it thoroughly before issuing a new one.”
- Build a working game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life - An intriguing challenge posted on the Code Golf Stack Exchange led to a worldwide collaboration over the course of eighteen months involving the design and implementation of an entire computer (and a dedicated programming language) from cellular automata: ”Due to the unprecedented scope of this collaboration, this answer is split in parts across multiple answers written by the members of this team… Rather than develop a Tetris game in Life directly, we slowly ratcheted up the abstraction in a series of steps. At each layer, we get further away from the difficulties of Life and closer to the construction of a computer that is as easy to program as any other.”
- Scientists discover an underwater city full of gloomy octopuses - Probably not what Ringo had in mind: ”The structure, which hosts 23 dens, consists of three patches of rocks, each surrounded by mounds of shells.” There are links to the abstracts of the academic papers, though you’ll need to find a friendly academic (or pay through the nose) to get access to the full text of them.
- Why You Feel the Urge to Jump - "Have you ever stood in a high place and felt the urge to jump?… The seemingly irrational, but common urge to leap—half of respondents felt it in one survey—can be so disturbing that ruminators from Jean-Paul Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) to anonymous contributors in lengthy Reddit sub-threads have agonized about it.” Jessica Siegel on the psychology of high places.
- The First Species to Have Every Individual’s Genome Sequenced - …is a cute, flightless parrot: ”The kakapo—once thought extinct—is one of the most thoroughly studied animals on the planet. Every single one of the last 153 kakapos on the planet is known to researchers. Every one carries a radio transmitter, so scientists know its position, as well as its movements and sex life. And soon, a team led by Andrew Digby from the Department of Conservation and Bruce Robertson from the University of Otago will sequence the genomes of all of these birds.”
- House Address “Twins” Proximity - "I found myself wondering what the shortest distance was between two Address Twins – houses with the same number and the same street-name." Paul Plowman digs through UK postal address data. The ending will surprise you
- Qatar Digital Library - "The Qatar Digital Library (QDL) is making a vast archive featuring the cultural and historical heritage of the Gulf and wider region freely available online for the first time. It includes archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and much more, complete with contextualised explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic." All kinds of stuff in here, such as this elephant-mounted clock described by Isma‘īl ibn al-Razzāz Jazarī around the twelfth century:
Happy invoicing!
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