Snow is forecast, but you can’t make that snowman until it arrives so you may as well stay in and read this lot instead 
Happy invoicing!
- They Write the Right Stuff - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this 1996 look at the work of the on-board shuttle group, who wrote the software for the Space Shuttle: ”Ten years ago the shuttle group was considered world-class. Since then, it has cut its own error rate by 90%… A look at the culture they have built and the process they have perfected shows what software-writing must become if software is to realize its promise, and illustrates what almost any team-based operation can do to boost its performance to achieve near-perfect results.” Bonus links, also from the Good Doctor: Mars ate my spacecraft!, and Computers in spaceflight, which has a link to a 500MB PDF of a book so titled, written for NASA on the subject.
- Oxford scientists successfully recreated a famous rogue wave in the lab - ”In 1995, a powerful rogue wave slammed into an offshore gas pipeline platform operated by Statoil in the southern tip of Norway. Dubbed the ‘Draupner wave,’ it generated intense interest among scientists, since the platform's various sensors and instruments provided precise details about the wave's dynamics… Now a team at the University of Oxford in England has successfully recreated the ‘Draupner wave’, according to a new paper in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.”
- No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime - If the waves don’t get you, the hagfish will: ”At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel… ‘Look at the hand holding the fish,’ the marine biologist Andrew Thaler once noted. ‘Is it completely covered in slime? Then, it’s a hagfish.’” And an excuse to reuse both the photo of the car covered in slime from a couple of years ago, and the “Is it completely covered in slime?” quote I also used then
- Spot The Drowning Child - HT to cojak for this site seeking to educate you on how to spot a child drowning in a busy swimming pool via a bunch of interactive videos. Click on the drowning child for more details about what’s going on and what to watch for.
- Battle of the Ax Men: Who Really Built the First Electric Rock 'n' Roll Guitar? - A detailed look at the history of the instrument: ”The birthplace of rock ’n’ roll could also be the former farming community of Fullerton in Orange County, California. That’s where an electronics autodidact name Clarence Leonidas “Leo” Fender founded a radio repair shop in 1938. By 1943, Fender and a friend named Clayton “Doc” Kaufman, who was Fender’s business partner in those days, had taken a solid plank of oak, painted it glossy black, attached a pickup at one end, and strung its length with steel strings.”
- The History of the Quirky Music Typewriter: Vintage Technologies for Printing Musical Notation - ”These ingenious machines do exactly what it sounds like they do, in typewriter-like forms we’ll recognize and other forms we will not. The first patent for such a device, filed in 1885 by Charles Spiro, shows an object resembling a sewing machine.”
- Van Gogh collects: Japanese Prints - ”Vincent van Gogh collected hundreds of Japanese prints. Now you too can gain the inspiration he found in the power and intense colours of Japanese art.” The Van Gogh Museum recently put his collection of around 600 prints online:
- We Finally Know How Long a Day on Saturn Is - ”By studying oscillations in the planet’s iconic rings, researchers have determined it takes Saturn 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 seconds to rotate once.” Quite odd that we didn’t know before, but at least that’s sorted out now
- Watney’s Red Barrel – how bad could it have been? - ”Watney’s (or Watney Mann, or Watney Combe Reid) was the Evil Corporation which sought to crush plucky small brewers and impose its own terrible beer on the drinking public… Its Red Barrel was particularly vile – a symbol of all that was wrong with industrial brewing and national brands pushed through cynical marketing campaigns. This, at least, was the accepted narrative for a long time.” Boak and Bailey investigate: could Red Barrel have actually been an acceptable beer?
- The Rise, Fall, and Lonely Death of Benny Hill - Rob Baker recounts the story of the comedian who died alone: ”On Easter Sunday morning in 1992, just two hours after he had been speaking to a television producer about yet another comeback, and five days after being released from hospital after a heart-scare, seventy-five- year-old Frankie Howerd collapsed and died. Benny Hill, seven years younger than Howerd, was quoted in the press as being ‘very upset’ and saying, ‘We were great, great friends.’ Indeed they had been friends, but Hill hadn’t given a quote about his fellow comedian, he hadn’t even been asked for one – he couldn’t have been – because he was already dead. ”
Happy invoicing!
. I can't help thinking it's about time to either close it or do something. Appears to be a case of when, not if something serious is going to happen.
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