A new month! Time just seems to fly by when the world is burning, but you can forget all that for now and read this lot instead 
Happy invoicing!
- I Saw the World on Cruise Ships - Devin Murphy escaped suburban life by going to sea: ”The captain yelled down from an open bridge window. ‘Are you my new deckhand?’ ‘No. New server.’ ‘Well. The deckhand didn’t show, so you’re now my new deckhand.’… I didn’t yell back that I’d never been on a ship before. ‘Sounds good,’ I said.”
- Say goodbye to Earth’s mini-moon on February 1 and 2 - ”In November, a new mini-moon began orbiting Earth. NASA later confirmed it’s a lost-and-found 60s-era rocket from the Surveyor 2 moon mission, launched more than 50 years ago. Now the object – SO 2020 – is coming close again for one last time. Here’s how to see it!” At 22:00 tonight, the Virtual Telescope Project will be live-streaming 2020 SO’s departure.
- The Kenyan Maasai Who Once Hunted Lions Are Now Their Saviors - Dr. Leela Hazzah founded Lion Guardians, which encourages Maasai warriors to conserve rather than kill lions: ”In the Maasai-owned lands of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania known as Maasailand, the lion population has rebounded… Building on their traditional tracking skills, the warriors learn to fit lions with tracking collars, then use radio telemetry antennas and GPS receivers to follow their movements and warn villagers and herders if a lion is in the vicinity to thwart any conflict.”
- A LEGO Counting problem - Danish mathematicians Søren Eilers, Mikkel Abrahamsen, and Bergfinnur Durhuus address the important question of how many ways Lego bricks can be put together: ”It is commonly believed that the number of ways to combine six two-by-four studded lego bricks of the same color is 102,981,500. This number was computed at LEGO in 1974 and has been systematically repeated by LEGO Company since… However, the number is wrong - very wrong.”
- The Mystery of Extraordinarily Accurate Medieval Maps - ”One of the most remarkable and mysterious technical advances in the history of the world is written on the hide of a 13th-century calf. Inked into the vellum is a chart of the Mediterranean so accurate that ships today could navigate with it… ‘Even with all the information he had — every sailor’s notebook, every description in every journal — I wouldn’t know how to make the map he made,’ says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the Library of Congress.” So Hessler set out to reverse-engineer the mapmaker’s techniques. This 1590 chart of Western Europe and the British Isles, attributed to Joan Oliva, shows the rhumb lines that characterise these portolan charts.
- It’s the wombat’s strange intestines, not its anus, that produces cubed poo - Important findings from Tasmania: ”Scientists have been puzzling for decades over how the Australian bare-nosed wombat poops out neat little cubes of feces instead of tapered cylinders like pretty much every other animal. According to a new paper published in the journal Soft Matter, the secret lies in their intestines, which have varying stiff and soft regions that serve to shape the poo during the digestive process.”
- The Oral History of 'Guitar Hero' - ”Since its debut in 2005, the Guitar Hero series has sold more than 25 million units, making more than $2 billion, and cementing itself as one of the best-selling video game series of all time… The story of Guitar Hero is one of a small developer and publisher, Harmonix and RedOctane, respectively, putting all their cards on the table, trying something new and unproven, with no track record or previous success to back them up. Over the course of just nine months in 2005, with no notions that the game they were working on would do more than break even, the two companies developed a game that altered the course of not only the game industry, but the world.” Blake Hester uncovers the story behind the game.
- Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii - The discovery of a well-preserved thermopolium has allowed Farrell Monaco to recreate a meal that would probably have been served there: ”Does all of this evidence suggest that meat boiled in broth at the corner popina is the Roman version of pub grub? I believe it does, and this now brings us much closer to proposing a first-century Roman meal that could allow us to explore this space using another investigative tool: our taste buds.” Includes recipes!
- 100 great films streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime – updated for winter 2021 - Want something to watch? The BFI has you covered: ”Beat the algorithms with our updated list of some of the essential deeper cuts available to watch now on Netflix UK and Amazon Prime.”
- Photo Contest Archive - As the title suggests, the archive of Smithsonian Magazine’s annual photo contest: ”Over the last 17 years, readers have submitted more than 470,000 images to Smithsonian’s annual photo contest. These photos have transported us to the far corners of Earth, captured spectacular, split-second moments and introduced us to fascinating people and unique landscapes. Browse breathtaking images captured by photographers from nearly every country in the world. Search by location and topic, and explore photographer portfolios for inspiration.” This old abandoned farmstead in Nebraska was photographed by Roger Richter in January 2020.
Happy invoicing!
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