Still nothing but tennis and football on the telly? It's a good job you can skive off work by reading this lot instead 
Happy invoicing!
- The Resurrection of Bass Reeves - ”His almost superhuman exploits made him one of the West's most feared lawmen. Today, the legendary deputy U.S. marshal is widely believed to be the real Lone Ranger. But his true legacy is even greater.” Cracking Western history
- AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments Beyond What Any Human Has Conceived - ”Quantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built… Eventually, he realized that the algorithm had rediscovered a type of experimental arrangement that had been devised in the early 1990s. But those experiments had been much simpler. MELVIN had cracked a far more complex puzzle.” Soon you'll be able to pick up mere human physicists dead cheap on eBay.
- A dry California creek bed looked like a wildfire risk. Then the beavers went to work - ”Seven years ago, ecologists looking to restore a dried-out Placer County floodplain faced a choice: Spend at least $1 million bringing in heavy machines to revive habitat or try a new approach. They went for the second option, and turned to nature’s original flood manager to do the work — the beaver.” Beavers, it transpires, are good at what they do
- Robbing the Xbox Vault: Inside a $10 Million Gift Card Cheat - ”A junior Microsoft engineer figured out a nearly perfect Bitcoin generation scheme.” Slightly inaccurate subhead there; he wasn't generating Bitcoins - he was fraudulently selling stuff and getting paid in them.
- Punched Card Typography — IBM 026, 029, 129 - ”Card punches of various types, models and makes featured an option to print the characters encoded by the holes punched in any of the columns in human readable form onto the top of the card. While it is well known that these characters were printed by a 5 × 7 dot matrix, comprehensive information on what these character glyphs looked like exactly and how they were effected is rather rare. What may be more reasonable than reconstructing them from their very form of technical encoding?” A deep dive into a rather ingenious bit of hardware from the good old days
- North Korean Uranium Conversion: History and Process, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 - If you've ever wondered how a nation that often can't even feed its own people manages to operate a uranium enrichment programme, Jamie Withorne at the Arms Control Wonk blog explains what we know: ”While this series does not attempt to identify North Korea’s uranium hexafluoride production capabilities, it does analyze other North Korean uranium conversion operations, processes, and associated locations.”
- These scientists spent decades pushing NASA to go back to Venus. Now they’re on a hot streak. - ”Our next-door planet is similar to Earth in size and composition, but extreme conditions made Venus a hellscape. Devoted researchers want to know what caused their wildly divergent paths.”
- Bringing emulation into the 21st century - As microservices are what all the cool kids do now, why not apply them in wildly inappropriate contexts? ”I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the lack of ambition shown by those in the emulation community. Whilst the rest of world moves onto cloud first, massively distributed architectures, emulation is still stuck firmly in the 20th century… This culminated in the implementation of an 8080 microprocessor utilising a modern, containerised, microservices based architecture running on kubernetes with frontends for a CP/M test harness and a full implementation of the original Space Invaders arcade machine.”
- Electron tube New Automatic Computer - Alternatively, why not go back to the very beginning of computing and start again? ”A tube computer for the 21st century. The Ena.Computer first ran on 28th May 2021. Built just for the fun of doing it, and with a blind faith due to my complete lack of any understanding of the problem.”
- Tugo Cheng Photography - Many beautiful images in this portfolio: ”Educated in Hong Kong, Beijing and Cambridge, Tugo Cheng is a Hong Kong based architect and fine art photographer who has received multiple international awards and nominations… Influenced by his architectural background, Cheng pays special attention to the order and rhythm in landscapes and cityscapes.” This landscape of terraces is in Yunnan:
Happy invoicing!
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