The new regulations don't apply online so if more than six of you want to read this stuff at the same time, it should be OK 
Happy invoicing!
- 19: The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire - As wildfires rage on the West Coast of the USA, a look back at a deadly fire in 2013 and the people who tried to fight it: ”On the morning of June 30, all 20 members of Prescott, Arizona's Granite Mountain Hotshots headed into the mountains to protect the small town of Yarnell from an advancing blaze. Later that day, every man but one was dead. Through interviews with family, colleagues, and the lone survivor, a former hotshot pieces together their final hours—and the fatal choices”
- Why is there a normal galaxy sitting at the edge of the Universe? - The Universe continues to confuse: ”Aided by a trick of gravity, astronomers have found a normal galaxy. Big deal, right? The thing is, where they found it is not normal: The light we see from it left the galaxy 12.4 billion years ago… A normal galaxy has no business being there when the cosmos was so young. But yet, there it sits.”
- The man who owned 3,000 cameras - ”One of the largest camera collections in the world is hidden away in a village hall in a Fife coastal town - but hardly anybody knows it is there… They include stereoscopic and 3D cameras as well as East European models, including many that were rare in the West.” HT to BR14 for this look at an interesting collection
- Extra DNA May Make Unlikely Hybrid Fish Possible - Researchers combined paddlefish sperm with sturgeon eggs, primarily to prove that nothing would happen. To their surprise, something did: ”Sturddlefish… go shockingly far beyond classic crossbreeds like mules and ligers, whose parent species sit close together on the tree of life. Sturddlefish result from the merger of different taxonomic families.”
- Minecraft fans have discovered the location of the "most iconic image in Minecraft history" - ”Pack.png is a picture you’ll probably have come across yourself if you’ve played Minecraft Java edition – it’s the image used for the default texture pack, as well as the default server icon. Finding the birthplace of this picture was no small feat, however, because it took eight months and two supercomputers to get there.” Nice that they’ve finally sorted it out
- Rare blue-eyed ginger seal pup found by Russian biologists at Sea of Okhotsk rookery - Weird things keep happening in Siberia: ”The brightly-coloured fur seal was born less than a month ago on the island of Tyuleny in the sea of Okhotsk. Experts say the chances of such a partial albino birth are one in 100,000, and there is a risk of rejection by the rookery as happened some years ago with another seal called Nafanya.”
- Hidden History of the Milky Way Revealed by Extensive Star Maps - Galactic weirdness too: ”The team had spotted a set of 30,000 renegade stars. Unlike other objects in the main body of the Milky Way, which orbit in a relatively flat disk shape, these nonconformists were moving backwards, in orbits that were carrying them out of the galactic plane… The luminous horde pointed to a long-hidden and especially tumultuous chapter in the Milky Way’s history: a smash-up between the young galaxy and a colossal companion.”
- A Wimpy Journey - James Walsh sets out to visit what’s left of the iconic burger chain: ”I’m now 40, and there are 66 Wimpys left. Wimpy is fading from the national consciousness, even as a nostalgic cliche. Both the burger chain and my idea to write about it seem to have been heading into obscurity together. Until today.”
- Reverse-engineering the first FPGA chip, the XC2064 - Ken Shirriff takes a break from the 8086: ”The FPGA was invented by Ross Freeman who co-founded Xilinx in 1984 and introduced the first FPGA, the XC2064. This FPGA is much simpler than modern FPGAs—it contains just 64 logic blocks, compared to thousands or millions in modern FPGAs—but it led to the current multi-billion-dollar FPGA industry… I reverse-engineered Xilinx's XC2064, and in this blog post I explain its internal circuitry (above) and how a ‘bitstream’ programs it.”
- Harrods for Everything - HT to ladymuck for this one: ”Harrods for Everything is the apt title of a huge 1,525-page catalogue from about 1912, produced by the famous London department store which is still in existence today. Some idea of the vast quantity of items that Harrods stocked or had available to order can be taken from the general index, which runs for 68 pages, five columns to a page. The catalogue illustrates over 15,000 products.” The Distributed Proofreaders project has spent years digitising it, and the whole thing is now available at Project Gutenberg
Happy invoicing!
Comment