The second wave is arriving, but just lock yourself in, stay calm, spend all your time reading (non-insane) stuff online, and you'll be fine 
Happy invoicing!
- Norges lengste vrakfunn bare meter fra hovedstrømkabel - ”Det siste av de store tyske krigsskipene fra andre verdenskrig er funnet. Flaks kan ha gjort at sjøkablene mellom Norge og Danmark ikke har truffet kanonene om bord.” What? You don't speak Norwegian? OK, here's a Google Translate link: Norway's longest wreck find just meters from the main power cable - ”The last of the large German warships from World War II has been found. Luck may have meant that the submarine cables between Norway and Denmark have not hit the cannons on board.” Ole Petter Hobberstad and his team have discovered the wreck of the German cruiser Karlsruhe, sunk off Kristiansand in April 1940.
- Surprise on Mars – Unexpected Reaction to Solar Eclipses From Martian Moon Phobos - ”NASA’s InSight mission provides data from the surface of Mars. Its seismometer, equipped with electronics built at ETH Zurich, not only records marsquakes, but unexpectedly reacts to solar eclipses as well. When the Martian moon, Phobos moves directly in front of the sun, the instrument tips slightly to one side. This miniscule effect could aid researchers in determining the planet’s interior.”
- Black, Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water - Joshua Sokol on a newly-discovered phase of water: ”Recently at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the world’s most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water’s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees… The X-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didn’t become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxically — but just as physicists squinting at screens in an adjacent room had expected — the atoms froze solid, forming crystalline ice.”
- 8086 microcode disassembled - ”Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed. This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode… I used bitract to extract the bits from the two main microcode ROMs, and also from the translation ROM which maps opcode bit patterns onto positions within the main microcode ROM.” If you thought machine code was tricky, try the code that implements the machine code
- Wolong Grove Panda Yard - Last week's elephants at Africam proved popular, but eek pointed that there aren't any pandas there, and helpfully provided these PandaCams to make up the deficiency ”The Wolong Grove live cam at the Shenshuping Gengda Panda Center in China's Wolong Valley Nature Reserve provides views into 11 different panda yards. Watch as these giant pandas go about their day in this lush bamboo oasis.”
- Shelved: Pink Floyd’s Household Objects - ”Listening to a renowned album as cohesive as The Dark Side of the Moon, you would never guess that the follow-up to that historic release was going to be made using everyday items. Household Objects, recorded during several desultory sessions over a two-year time frame, was constructed with rubber bands, wine glasses, spray cans, newspapers, brooms, and other such utilitarian gear. It was shelved.” A curious change of creative direction in Pink Floyd's hiatus between The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.
- Watch Out: Objects in the Universe are Bigger than They Appear - ”Earlier this week, researchers working on a sky-mapping project called AMIGA reported that the early stages of the Andromeda-Milky Way collision will happen long before the main event. You don't have to wait 4 billion years to watch a galaxy smash-up. With a little vision enhancement, you can sense it happening right now... because the Andromeda-Milky Way collision has already begun.” I, for one, welcome our new Andromedan overlords
- Taking a look at Gerät 32620 - ”A few years ago, I first stumbled over some recordings of number stations and started reading up on their history… There are actually links to technical documentation about the Speech generator and its companion device, Gerät 32621, which could be used for digitizing voice recordings and writing them to EPROM cartridges to use with Gerät 32620.” An examination of a piece of technology used by the Soviet bloc to communicate with agents in the West.
- Fully documented source code for Elite on the BBC Micro - Ian Bell made the source code for the original version of Elite available years ago, and Paul Brink annotated it in 2014. Now Mark Moxon has documented it properly: ”This repository contains the original source code for Elite on the BBC Micro, with every single line documented and (for the most part) explained. The annotated source can be assembled on modern computers to produce a working game disc that can be loaded into a BBC Micro or an emulator… Hopefully this repository will be useful for those who want to learn more about Elite and what makes it tick. It is provided on an educational and non-profit basis, with the aim of helping people appreciate one of the most iconic games of the 8-bit era.”
- Giant new 50-metre deep 'crater' opens up in Arctic tundra - When they said Russia was opening up, I didn't realise they meant it literally: ”The recently-formed new hole or funnel is the latest to be seen in northern Siberia since the phenomenon was first registered in 2014… Such funnels are believed to be caused by the build up of methane gas in pockets of thawing permafrost under the surface.”
Happy invoicing!
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