Another year of this stuff? Go on then 
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- The Whalers’ Odyssey - ”The Lamalerans are the last of their kind. For five centuries, the Indonesian tribe has survived by hunting whales from a rocky Pacific island so remote that their countrymen call it the land left behind… Whaling is harsh, dangerous work, and not every hunt is successful. Such was the case in 1994, when the Lamalerans undertook a harrowing voyage that became the kind of legend that fathers tell their sons. Not only did they fight for their lives against a seemingly invincible whale, but they confronted a danger new to many of them, one more threatening than any leviathan: the outside world.” Doug Bock Clark tells their story.
- Study: modern masters like Jackson Pollock were “intuitive physicists” - ”In the 1930s, a small group of New York City artist—including Mexican muralist David A. Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock—began experimenting with novel painting techniques and materials. For the last few years, a team of Mexican physicists has been studying the physics of fluids at work in those techniques, concluding that the artists were "intuitive physicists," using science to create timeless art.”
- The long memory of the Pacific Ocean - ”The ocean has a long memory. When the water in today's deep Pacific Ocean last saw sunlight, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor, the Song Dynasty ruled China and Oxford University had just held its very first class.” The full paper from which this article draws is at Science: The Little Ice Age and 20th-century deep Pacific cooling by G. Gebbie and P. Huybers.
- Dante's Inferno - ”The illustrated and interactive Dante's Inferno, an alternative learning tool for the Divine Comedy first Cantica, made for aiding visual memory.” If you've always wanted an interactive tool for exploring Dante's work, here it is!
- Water • Shapes • Earth - ”A project that combines power of aerial photography and storytelling to rediscover the beauty of our planet, and to show how water shapes Earth and influences our lives.”
- The A380 Fuel System - BA pilot Dave Allsworth explains the complexities of the A380's fuel system: ”This is the one part of the A380 course which I worked my way through, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then went back to the start of the topic and started again! ”
- This baby sperm whale was tangled in ocean trash for 3 years - How Digit, a sperm whale from the Caribbean, was crippled by a length of rope around her tail: ”That could prevent her from diving, which is how sperm whales hunt food. As she grew, the constriction would also slice through her flesh, strangling tissue like a garrote. The line might even amputate her fluke, though infection or starvation would probably do her in first.”
- This Parasite Drugs Its Hosts With the Psychedelic Chemical in Shrooms - ”Imagine emerging into the sun after 17 long years spent lying underground, only for your butt to fall off. That ignominious fate regularly befalls America’s cicadas.” Ed Yong on the parasitic fungus that controls insects by drugging them with psilocybin
- Bezier Moi - An exploration of Bezier curves, using the Julia language: ”Two engineers employed in the French car industry, Paul de Faget de Casteljau, at Citroen, and Pierre Etienne Bézier, at Renault, worked—mostly independently—on the mathematics of curves in the early 1960s, as the industry made its first tentative steps towards using computers for design and production… De Casteljau found some resistance when his mathematical researches were introduced into the design studio. He observed that: 'The designers were astonished and scandalized. Was it some kind of joke? It was considered nonsense to represent a car body mathematically. It was enough to please the eye, the word ‘accuracy’ had no meaning.'”
- Photographer documents the fakest places around the world - ”Back in June 2015, Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer travelled to seven countries to find and document artificial communities for his series, The Potemkin Village. These fake communities… are often put up with the intent to either hide or simulate an existing town or city.” Sailer's gallery of the images is at The Potemkin Village, and also available in book form.
Happy invoicing!
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