Happy Summer Solstice! 
Happy invoicing!
- Inside The Enduring Hunt For The Mysterious Oak Island Treasure - ”For more than 200 years, treasure hunters have flocked to Oak Island in search of pirate gold — which is said to be buried in the ‘Money Pit’ on the Nova Scotia isle.” The background to the TV series that at least some of you enjoy so much
- Two Viking burials, separated by an ocean, contain close kin - ”Roughly a thousand years ago, a young man in his early 20s met a violent end in England. Eight hundred kilometers (500 miles) away, in Denmark, an older man who had survived a lifetime of battles died sometime in his 50s. At first glance, there’s nothing to suggest a connection between them over such a distance. But according to a recent study of their DNA, the two men were second-degree relatives: half-siblings, uncle and nephew, or grandfather and grandson.” It seems Vikings had freedom of movement within Europe
- Exploring The Universe That Wasn’t - ”When we look out at the Universe from our perspective here and now, we only get a snapshot of existence… But if things had been only a tiny bit different, our Universe would have been dramatically different. Here are five things that could have happened to change the course of our shared cosmic history.”
- Wayfinder - From the National Film Board of Canada: ”Wayfinder is a web-based generative art game that takes the player on a contemplative cause-and-effect journey through nature. Symbolizing the give-and-take relationship humans have with the natural world, players move a mystical character through forest, grasslands and tundra in search of poetic tokens dotting the landscape.”
- Creature Comforts: Ramp-Wrapped Towers Help Flatland Goats Feel More at Home - ”Along flat stretches of countryside from Argentina and South Africa to the United Kingdom, strange spires can be spotted at a great distance, but what really stands out up close is the goats that occupy them.” I wasn’t previously aware of goat towers, but now I really want to visit one
- Freeing Oysters from a Parasite’s Hold - ”Armed with traditional knowledge and modern science, a small team hunts for the sweet spot that could save oysters from a parasite that has decimated populations in Cape Breton and beyond.” Not keen on seafood myself, mind, but if the oysters aren’t doing any harm I suppose helping them is a good thing
- The Strange Tale of Echo, the Parrot Who Saw Too Much - The bird that had to be put in a witness protection programme: ”Echo was owned by a New Orleans crime boss and he'd been at the wrong place at the wrong time, seen something he wasn't supposed to, and wouldn't stop talking about it.”
- Dot Dot Dot - A simple but infuriating browser game. Click to place balls, and try to get the falling ball to bounce off them into the hole
- Inside a transistorized shift register box, built in 1965 for Apollo testing - Ken Shirriff with another bit of space programme hardware: ”One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Apollo launches to the Moon is how much testing was required. I recently came across an item that was part of this testing: the Computer Buffer Unit. It is essentially a 16-bit shift register that interfaced test equipment to the Apollo Guidance Computer. While a shift register is a trivial circuit nowadays, back then it took a box full of transistors that weighed about 5 pounds.”
- Why Kids Loved Shell Oil in the Early 1970s: The ‘Man in Flight’ Series of Collectible Coins - From those halcyon days when petrol stations ran promotions more interesting than bonus Nectar points: ”With every purchase of petrol at a Shell garage, a Man in Flight coin was given out. As it was pot luck which coin you got, it was inevitable there were more duplicates than complete sets. Thankfully, my old man had to put in many hours driving here-and-there and by the middle of 1970 when Mungo Jerry was singing In The Summertime, my brother and I had our own complete sets.”
Happy invoicing!
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