Now you’ve recovered the trampoline from the garden four houses down the street for the second time in a week, you can settle back and read this lot 
Happy invoicing!
- Going the Distance (and Beyond) to Catch Marathon Cheaters - Derek Murphy has made it his mission to catch people who take shortcuts when running marathons: ”Murphy looked at race photos and noticed that Seo was wearing a Garmin fitness-tracking watch… Murphy bought the race photographer's high-resolution photo and zoomed in on the watch. Amazingly, he could see that Seo had run only 11.65 miles of the 13.1-mile race.”
- Artificial Atoms Could Usher In the Quantum Revolution - ”Australian scientists have used artificial atoms called quantum dots to make a quantum silicon chip they say is surprisingly stable. The quantum dots make quantum bits, or qubits, and the qubits’s instability has been a bottleneck in designing this kind of chip.”
- ‘Reaper of Death’ tyrannosaur discovered in Canada - The identification of 79.5 million year old fossils gives clues to the tyrannosaurs' rise to the top of the food chain: ”After two years of careful research, Voris and his colleagues have identified the first new Canadian tyrannosaurid to be found in 50 years. Stretching 26 feet in length, the dinosaur is named Thanatotheristes, Greek for ‘reaper of death.’”
- The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code - ”It’s an approximately 600-year-old mystery that continues to stump scholars, cryptographers, physicists, and computer scientists: a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language, brimming with bizarre drawings of esoteric plants, naked women, and astrological symbols. Known as the Voynich manuscript, it defies classification, much less comprehension.” Even if you’re familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, this piece includes good explanations of some of the up-and-coming theories about its meaning that will, inevitably, be shot down in flames almost as soon as they’re published.
- The Internet of Beefs - HT to quackhandle for this handy explanation of most of General: ”A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.”
- Romantic London - Not a belated Valentine’s reference, but a project mapping London in the Romantic period of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries: ”Romantic London is a research project exploring life and culture in London around the turn of the nineteenth century using Richard Horwood’s pioneering ‘PLAN of the Cities of LONDON and WESTMINSTER the Borough of SOUTHWARK, and PARTS adjoining Shewing every HOUSE’ (published between 1792 and 1799)… The site uses Horwood’s work as a means of thinking about how writers, publishers and artists chose to represent London’s general character and particularities.”
- Korean Classic Film - Now that the Oscars have brought the vibrant Korean film industry to everybody’s attention, you’ll want to get a solid grounding so you can appear cool at dinner parties, and the Korean Film Archive has you covered with hundreds of full-length Korean films. This is Im Kwon-taek’s Ticket from 1985, and I gather it may be a bit NSFW; but it has English subtitles
- Palindromes, Palindromes, Mother****er, What! - URL shortener link as it wouldn’t get past the naughty words filter ”[Leigh] Mercer has long since been placed in the upper ranks of the great palindromists… But outside the world of word game enthusiasts (a.k.a. logologists), he is largely unknown. This despite being the author of a seven-word, mostly inaccurate synopsis of a complex engineering feat that became one of the most widely known palindromes in English.”
- Turn an old eReader into an Information Screen (Nook STR) - Terence Eden finds a use for an old bit of electronics with the help of various bits of open source software: ”Here's a quick tutorial for turning an old Nook into a passive display… End result: an eInk screen which displays the trains I can catch from my local station.” You might not have the same bit of kit lying around, but maybe it’ll give you inspiration and a few pointers to help you do something interesting with some other piece of junk
- The Village Genius: Astonishing Photos Of Soviet Life Found In An Abandoned House - ”In the spring of 2016, film student Victor Galusca was exploring a sleepy village in his native Moldova when the 23-year-old noticed some photographic negatives in the rubble of an abandoned house. The discarded pictures were the life’s work of Zaharia Cusnir, an unknown amateur photographer who died in 1993.” New Year looks a bit ropey, but I suppose you had to make your own entertainment in a Soviet-era Moldovan village:
Happy invoicing!
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