A Bank Holiday Monday, and no traffic jams to get stuck in! As ladymuck says, it really is the End of Days 
Happy invoicing!
- The Bears Who Came to Town and Would Not Go Away - Troubling times in Luchegorsk, a remote town in Primorsky: ”This is the story of a place at the edge of the world, where a black bear ventured into a Russian hamlet and attacked a human. One bear became two, two became dozens, and before long no one would leave their home, and no one had any idea what to do.”
- Relive the Drama of Apollo 13 in Real Time, As It Happened - This time fifty years ago, Apollo 13 was still running smoothly. The Apollo 13 in Real Time project is now live with all the footage, audio, and transcripts; this is an interview with Ben Feist, who masterminds the AiRT projects for NASA: ”Well, there’s lots of information to be gleaned on when did things occur and how fast did they develop on the ground. There’s a lot of historical inaccuracy to undo after the Apollo 13 film… In the film it’s depicted like [the astronauts] know what’s going on onboard, and the guys on the ground are kind of playing catch-up until eventually the guys on the ground crack the case. But they knew on the ground that there was a problem before the radio call came down [from the astronauts] to say they had a problem. They were talking about it already, like, ‘What’s going on? What just happened? What’s wrong with your data?’” The well-known Problem arises in just about sixteen hours, if you want to stay up until it happens
- When the Goodies met Orson Welles - In memory of Tim Brooke-Taylor, the story of their collaboration with Orson Welles, including several videos from Welles’ archives: ”Graeme Garden and I made two series of a sketch show called Broaden Your Mind in 1968 and ‘69. We were watching the first programme of the second series in Graeme’s flat. As it ended Graeme’s phone rang. He answered it, said a few words, put the phone down and said: ‘That was Orson Welles’… We saw him the next day and agreed to write and shoot some stuff with him.”
- Anthropologists describe the first skeleton of a Homo naledi child - Why do humans take longer to grow up than the other great ape species? ”In 2013 and 2014, paleoanthropologists unearthed the partial skeleton of a Homo naledi child dating from 335,000 to 226,000 years ago… The shafts of the long bones hadn’t completely fused with their ends, or epiphyses, which is a sign that the young hominin was still growing when they died.”
- NASA’s $1 Billion Spacecraft Has Taken Mind-Bending New Photos Of Jupiter - These are actually over a year old, but they’re really nice ”The latest batch of photos features countless swirling, hallucinatory clouds and storms. Researchers at NASA and the Southwest Research Institute uploaded the raw image data to their websites in late December [2018].”
- Lost: How a dead man saved two Dallas hikers - ”They rode a tram to the top of a mountain to have drinks. Instead, they wound up lost in the California wilderness for four days. For the first time, a Dallas couple shares the harrowing story of how a dead man saved their lives.” HT to Uncle Albert for this fascinating story; I’m surprised Hollywood haven’t made a film of this one.
- Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math. - Natalie Wolchover on the work of physicist Nicolas Gisin to resolve the conflict between relativistic and quantum interpretations of time: ”Gisin argues that time in general and the time we call the present are easily expressed in a century-old mathematical language called intuitionist mathematics, which rejects the existence of numbers with infinitely many digits… Physicists are still digesting Gisin’s work — it’s not often that someone tries to reformulate the laws of physics in a new mathematical language — but many of those who have engaged with his arguments think they could potentially bridge the conceptual divide between the determinism of general relativity and the inherent randomness at the quantum scale.”
- Agent57: Outperforming the human Atari benchmark - AI is coming for your retro gaming console: ”The Atari57 suite of games is a long-standing benchmark to gauge agent performance across a wide range of tasks. We’ve developed Agent57, the first deep reinforcement learning agent to obtain a score that is above the human baseline on all 57 Atari 2600 games. Agent57 combines an algorithm for efficient exploration with a meta-controller that adapts the exploration and long vs. short-term behaviour of the agent.”
- Facts and History of Eating Utensils - One of those wonderful single interest sites that will tell you far more than you ever thought there was to know about its subject: ”Since the prehistoric times, our need for preservation and advancement brought creation of many new tools that enabled easier and more productive life. Among many of those fascinating tools were eating utensils - hand used tools that enabled us to better prepare, serve and eat food. These eating tools received countless dynamic advancement in line to the changing tastes, eating habits and technological states of civilizations throughout the ages.”
- Photographing The Brighton Bomb and Other News - John Downing was one of the great British press photographers of the 20th century: ”I always said I’d love to take a picture that will last beyond my lifetime – to take one which will be historically interesting in other words. You won’t know until I’m gone really if I’ve taken a picture like that but I feel there are a couple of pictures I’m proud of.” Here’s a traditional Easter scene: skinheads putting the boot in at Southend-On-Sea on Easter Monday, April 7th 1980
Happy invoicing!
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