How the hell can it be December already? 
Happy invoicing!
- The Hidden Heroines of Chaos - The story of chaos theory has usually been told in terms of the men who supposedly discovered the field. Turns out that, as usual, that version omits the women who played pivotal roles, Margaret Hamilton (yes, that one) and Ellen Fetter: ”Lorenz was not the one running the machine. There’s another story, one that has gone untold for half a century. A year and a half ago, an MIT scientist happened across a name he had never heard before and started to investigate. The trail he ended up following took him into the MIT archives, through the stacks of the Library of Congress, and across three states and five decades to find information about the women who, today, would have been listed as co-authors on that seminal paper.”
- Runway Palette - Interesting application of machine learning to the world of fashion: ”We've collaborated with The Business of Fashion to analyze 144,000 runway looks from 3,800 shows. We removed the background from each of the 144,000 looks and extracted the color palettes of the outfits. This map shows all the looks, organized by similarity using machine learning.”
- Quantum computing’s also-rans and their fatal flaws - Various approaches to implementing qubits have been tried, and many have proved unworkable: ”A practical quantum computer requires that we can create many quantum bits (qubits). Those qubits have to stay in a quantum state for multiple gate operations. Gate operations require that we are able to manipulate qubits on both an individual basis and in groups (or at least pairs). And, of course, you have to be able to read out the result of a computation… While qubit behavior is dictated by physics at the individual qubit level, once you think about scaling, engineering really matters, and a lot of these options aren't very amenable to scaling.”
- The Archaeology of Greater London online map - Interactive map for exploring archaeological finds in London over the prehistoric, Roman, Saxon, and mediaeval periods.
- Abandoned America: Six Flags New Orleans - ”Opened in 2000 on 140 acres of land in east New Orleans, rides at the Jazzland amusement park paid homage to music and the city's heritage. It was sold two years later to Six Flags… Hurricane Katrina hit the park hard in August of 2005; the property flooded and was submerged for a month in up to 7 feet of water. The prolonged exposure to salt water rendered many of the rides unsafe, and Six Flags considered the park a total loss.” America's rival to the Pripyat Amusement Park explored.
- Nine Things I Learned When I Became a Honeymoon Planner for Billionaires - I suspect some of these people are merely millionaires, to be honest, but turns out that's still enough money to be utterly ridiculous: ”Sometimes the requests are so massive in scope that construction crews need to get involved. For a five-night trip, one prominent television actress paid $40,000 to have her hotel bathroom’s granite sink lifted 7 inches higher—all so she wouldn’t have to bend over when washing her face.”
- Lost Cities: a story of coral - Nice interactive thing; it's a collection of videos so you'll need the sound up, though it has subtitles if you forgot your headphones today. ”Lost can mean gone. But it can also mean hidden, waiting to be discovered. Corals are both. It’s true that an alarming number of reefs are now gone, casualties of the deadly conditions caused by climate change and other alterations humans have made to the planet. Yet it’s also true that many reefs remain vibrant and dynamic places, bustling cities beneath the waves.” The project is dedicated to Dr. Ruth Gates, who narrates the videos and who died last year from surgical complications.
- The 'Sweating Disease' That Swept Across England 500 Years Ago is Still a Medical Mystery - ” In the late 15th century, a mystery disease broke out in England. Thousands died and terror stalked the land… It may have altered history by killing Prince Arthur, the heir to the throne whose death ushered in the tumultuous reign of Henry VIII. The disease remains one of medicine’s great mysteries. It came in five waves, and haunted Tudor England for 70 years before disappearing.”
- Did This Couple Steal a $160 Million de Kooning? - A strange tale from the world of art theft: ”It was the day after Thanksgiving 1985 when the couple arrived at the University of Arizona Museum of Art… Less than 10 minutes passed before the couple hastily departed in a rust-colored car. With them went the museum’s prized painting—Willem de Kooning’s 1955 ‘Woman-Ochre,’ then valued at $400,000 and now worth an estimated $160 million. Thirty-two years later, ‘Woman-Ochre’ resurfaced in a surprising locale: behind the door of a recently deceased couple’s New Mexico bedroom.”
- The Hipgnosis Album Cover Gallery - ”Hipgnosis is The Beatles of album cover art — nobody has ever done it better than the British design firm founded by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell… Below is a gallery of all 190 Hipgnosis covers.” You’ll know, and probably own, more than a few of these
Happy invoicing!
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