Is staying at home under lockdown better than being stuck in a Bank Holiday traffic jam on the M5 for six hours? It is, isn’t it. Admit it 
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- Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea - Ben Taub on the Five Deeps Expedition of undersea explorer Victor Vescovo: ”Most submarines go down several hundred metres, then across; this one was designed to sink like a stone… Under the passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of the viewports, into the blue. It would take nearly four hours to reach the bottom.”
- What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about the Brain - Christof Koch on what we can learn from that tunnel-of-light stuff: ”Thousands of survivors of these harrowing touch-and-go situations tell of leaving their damaged bodies behind and encountering a realm beyond everyday existence… NDEs can be either positive or negative experiences. The former receive all the press.”
- NSTMF Lab - That's the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation to you, and this is a set of cool interactive things to learn about gravity, sound, and image processing. As the gravity one says: ”Create your universe”
- AMP Cinema For Free - AMP being the site, Asian Movie Pulse, and this being a collection of Asian films you can watch for free (although rights issues might mean some of the ones listed can’t be watched in the UK). This is 바보선언 / Declaration of Idiot (Baboseon-eon), a 1983 film from director Lee Jang-ho.
- No, NASA did not discover a parallel universe where time runs backwards - ”The bottom line is this particle detector did find something really strange, but it's not clear what it is. Saying it ‘discovered’ a parallel universe is simply not true. At best the data are consistent with this idea.” Given the state of the non-alternative universe at the moment, “consistent with this idea” still sounds really promising
- The Wild Shrub at the Root of the Afghan Meth Epidemic - To add to its existing problems, Afghanistan now has meth, the precursor for which can be quickly and easily extracted from a native shrub: ”Rehman, a forensic scientist with the Afghan government’s Forensic Medicine Directorate, stops to catch his breath and scans the uneven ground ahead. He is searching for Ephedra sinica, a hardy, sage-colored shrub that grows abundantly across central and northern Afghanistan. The plant contains a naturally-occurring stimulant called ephedrine — the synthetic version of which is a common ingredient in decongestants and weight loss pills, and is often used to make crystal methamphetamine.”
- When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery - ”Maxis didn’t want to make professional simulation games. But for two brief, strange years, they did… Their games found their way into in corporate training rooms and even went as far as the White House.” The story of Maxis Business Simulations, spun off from the game development company that created SimCity because business people wanted to believe that simulations could improve their understanding of reality
- The Story Behind ‘Lunch Atop A Skyscraper,’ The Photo That Inspired Great Depression-Era America - Natasha Ishak uncovers the story behind the iconic photograph, and others from the series: ”’Lunch Atop A Skyscraper’ was taken as a publicity stunt to promote the construction of the new Rockefeller Center, but it quickly became a symbol of hope for a struggling nation.”
- #BachUpsideDown - Dan Tepfer plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations, with a twist in the tail: ”Bach was such a badass, and — to be more specific — such a master of counterpoint, that his music sounds almost as good upside down as it does right side up. So I wrote a computer program that records what I play, then plays it back upside down.” What’s more, it actually plays his piano
- Big Box Collection - Cool retro gaming stuff from Benjamin Wimmer: ”Remember When Video Games Came In Big Boxes? I most certainly do as I'm collecting them. For sharing my games with other (retro) gaming heads, I decided to turn my collection of 653 boxes into shiny 3D. As of now, 98% of my boxes are available on this site.” Fun fact (well, it is to me): in 1988 I almost got to work on this Elvira game, but the company which had bought the rights and was commissioning us to do it was suddenly shut down by its parent company, and whoever got the rights after that went elsewhere. So I didn’t
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