It's far too hot to actually do anything with the family, so send them away to the safari park while you stay home in the shade and read this lot 
Happy invoicing!
- How to become a great impostor - HT to ladymuck for this great study of conman Ferdinand Waldo Demara: ”His 23-year career was rather varied. He was, among other things, a doctor, professor, prison warden and monk. Demara was not some kind of genius either – he actually left school without any qualifications. Rather, he was ‘The Great Impostor’, a charming rogue who tricked his way to notoriety.”
- As Elephants and Whales Disappear, They Take Valuable Cancer Clues With Them - ”Cetaceans — the group of mammals that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises — evolved clever ways of dealing with cancer, including an array of tumor-suppressing genes… The findings, along with similar work on elephants, suggest that somewhere, hiding in the genetic code and evolutionary history of large mammals, there could be a new cancer treatment for humans. But if the researchers are correct, their window to study these megafauna may be closing as humans continue to threaten the animals’ populations and the biodiversity of their habitats.” Turns out ravaging the planet for short-term gain might be a bad idea. Who could have guessed?
- The cholera map that changed the world in 3D - A simple but clever idea that clarifies John Snow’s famous map of the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho: ”Our 3D version uprights the original stacks of death, creating a vertical stack in the third dimension. This helps us visualize where the deaths occurred at their correct geographic location, which is important when gauging distances to the closest water pumps.”
- A Walk In Hong Kong - Maciej Cegłowski, previously seen here accidentally wandering into a top secret Chinese aerospace complex and eating steak in Argentina (among other things), is now in Hong Kong to see the future of protest: ”Coming in to the Hong Kong protests from a less developed country like the United States is disorienting… The protesters learned in 2014 that having leaders was a weakness. Once the leadership was arrested, the heart went out of the occupy movement, and it lost momentum. So in 2019, there is no leadership at all. The protests are intentionally decentralized, using a jury-rigged combination of a popular message board, the group chat app Telegram, and in-person huddles at the protests. This sounds like it shouldn’t possibly work, but the protesters are too young to know that it can’t work, so it works.”
- Super Sad True Chef Story - Samuel Ashworth tries working in a Michelin-starred French kitchen: ”The French brigade system and the ritual of staging has defined what it means to train as a fine dining chef for more than a century — and it broke me after a week.”
- 21st Century Datacenter Locations Driven by 19th Century Politics - How the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 determines modern Internet infrastructure in the USA: ”The vast bulk of east/west data traffic in the United States passes through each of these cities via the largest collection of fiber optic cables from the highest diversity of telecommunication companies… Each of these cables are buried in the contiguous 200-foot right-of-way alongside the first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869.”
- Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder - And what do we do with all that connectivity? Lie to one another. ”Humans are wired to respond to emotional triggers and share misinformation if it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices… Designers of the social platforms fervently believed that connection would drive tolerance and counteract hate. They failed to see how technology would not change who we are fundamentally—it could only map onto existing human characteristics.”
- Trails of Wind: The architecture of airport runways - A map showing the orientation of every airport runway in the world: ”Winds circulate around the globe, forming patterns of gigantic proportions… By orienting on the direction of general winds, airports recreate wind patterns, forming a representation of a global wind map with steel and stone, thus making the invisible visible.”
- Day Trip - ”On Sunday we drive to prison… I used to cry on this drive. Now I don’t. I don’t seethe anymore, either. And I’ve stopped hoping. Everything that could go wrong already did.” Sophia Moskalenko takes her children to visit their father.
- Behind the scenes at Earth’s most beautiful rocket launch site - ”Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex-1 looks like an industry brochure come to life (better in fact). Located at the southern tip of the picturesque Mahia Peninsula on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, LC-1 is currently the only operational Rocket Lab launch site where the Electron vehicle—Rocket Lab’s low-cost small satellite launch vehicle—takes flight.” Trevor Mahlmann went there to photograph their launch on December 16th last year
Happy invoicing!
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