Those of you who sit near a window may be taken in by the appearance of sunshine, but it’s dashed chilly out there; better to stay on the Internet where it’s always warm 
Happy invoicing!
- 3 Terrifying Stories from Yosemite's Search and Rescue - ”Yosemite National Park is home to some of the nation’s most beautiful natural features that can turn deadly with just one wrong step… search and rescue veteran Charles R. “Butch” Farabee goes deep on all the ways visitors get into trouble in the park—and the heroic efforts of the SAR teams who try to help them.” More good reasons not to go to places
- Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai - Somebody is doing something weird to GPS signals around Shanghai harbour: ”Nobody knows who is behind this spoofing, or what its ultimate purpose might be. These ships could be unwilling test subjects for a sophisticated electronic warfare system, or collateral damage in a conflict between environmental criminals and the Chinese state that has already claimed dozens of ships and lives. But one thing is for certain: there is an invisible electronic war over the future of navigation in Shanghai, and GPS is losing.”
- The everything town in the middle of nowhere - In a small town in Montana, a number of women have found an unusual Plan B: ”There’s no fulfillment center, Amazon’s term for the enormous warehouses where it stores and dispatches goods. In fact, there’s no official Amazon presence of any kind. Instead, Roundup is home to a growing industry of prep centers, businesses that specialize in packing goods to meet the demanding requirements of Amazon’s highly automated warehouses.”
- Three Physicists Stumbled Upon a Striking Mathematical Discovery - ”After breakfast one morning in August, the mathematician Terence Tao opened an email from three physicists he didn’t know. The trio explained that they’d stumbled across a simple formula that, if true, established an unexpected relationship between some of the most basic and important objects in linear algebra… Although the physicists could hardly believe they’d discovered a new fact about such bedrock math, they couldn’t find the relationship in any books or papers. So they took a chance and contacted Tao, despite a note on his website warning against such entreaties.” Eigenvectors and eigenvalues, apparently. No, I don't know either
- BBC Records - A site dedicated to the BBC's old record publishing arm, which put out a wide variety of audio content. This is the gallery, but there are some interesting articles in the blog: ”Let’s start with the main catalogue of BBC Radio Enterprises, which later became BBC Records, then BBC Records & Tapes and then finally BBC Records again before wandering off into cassette only and even CD releases and finally petering out altogether and being replaced with another BBC catalogue.”
- Open Source Code Will Survive the Apocalypse in an Arctic Cave - GitHub are squirrelling away copies of open source code in Svalbard: ”Deep inside one of the mine’s frigid, eerily quiet arteries, Friedman comes to what looks like a metal tool shed… This is the Arctic World Archive, the seed vault’s much less sexy cousin.”
- Scientists find eternal Nile to be more ancient than previously thought - ”Ancient Egyptians considered the Nile river to be the source of all life. The steady northward path of the river has nourished the fertile valleys of northeast Africa for millions of years… [Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin] found the eternal river to be much older than anyone realized, with the scientists estimating the age of the Nile to be 30 million years—about six times as long as previously thought.” It's all to do with the movement of rock in the Earth's mantle, apparently.
- Why scientists need to be better at data visualization - Betsy Mason provides a thorough overview of various data visualisation techniques, explaining how they mainly get used incorrectly and what to do instead: ”Science is littered with poor data visualizations that confound readers and can even mislead the scientists who make them… Research has begun to reveal how people read, and misread, different kinds of visualizations and which types of charts are most effective and easiest to decipher.”
- Space-grade CPUs: How do you send more computing power into space? - A look at the extreme demands placed upon electronics by space travel: ”Curiosity, everyone’s favorite Mars rover, works with two BAE RAD750 processors clocked at up to 200MHz… The price tag on the RAD750 is around $200k. Why not just throw an iPhone in there and call it a day? Performance-wise, iPhones are entire generations ahead of RAD750s and cost just $1k apiece, which remains much less than $200k.”
- Uzbekistan's Secret Underground - ”After a longtime ban on photographing the Tashkent Metro was lifted this summer, RFE/RL’s photographer went underground to reveal the art, architecture, and nuclear-blast protection in Central Asia’s oldest subway system.” Amos Chapple’s photos make the fancy tiles at Tube stations like Charing Cross look a bit amateurish, frankly
Happy invoicing!
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