It has been brought to my attention that we're allowed out now. The question is, why bother going out there when there's all this to read from the safety and comfort of your armchair? 
Happy invoicing!
- A dog’s inner life: what a robot pet taught me about consciousness - ”The creators of the Aibo robot dog say it has ‘real emotions and instinct’. This may seem over the top, but is it? In today’s AI universe, all the eternal questions have become engineering problems.” Meghan O'Gieblyn finds that living with an Aibo raises interesting philosophical questions.
- Physicists Create a Bizarre ‘Wigner Crystal’ Made Purely of Electrons - More quantum weirdness: ”In 1934, Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, theorized a strange kind of matter — a crystal made from electrons. The idea was simple; proving it wasn’t. Physicists tried many tricks over eight decades to nudge electrons into forming these so-called Wigner crystals, with limited success. In June, however, two independent groups of physicists reported in Nature the most direct experimental observations of Wigner crystals yet.”
- 'I Found Your Mom’ - ”On a July night in 1979, Dolores Wulff, beloved mother of four, vanished from the family’s home. Her 12-year-old son, Paul, would grow up to become a college football coach while never knowing his mother’s fate. Forty-one years later, he would finally be able to piece together some details of her disappearance.”
- Hollywood Age Gap - A site devoted to the curious phenomenon seen in movies of young women supposedly falling for old men. Woody Allen, unsurprisingly, is prominent in the list
- The fugitive and the chameleon - ”Mario stood wide-eyed and, not for the first time, in awe of his father. Ramon Montoya was always quick to action. Yet he was a careful man, so slow to trust other people, watching strangers warily, listening quietly. He hated to draw attention to himself… What Mario didn’t know at the time, as they stood at the river’s edge, stalking their own quarry, was that, beyond the Black Mesa and the desert, up north in the Rockies, someone was hunting Ramon Montoya.”
- The Westminster Detective Library - ”100s of detective stories, all before 1891.” A huge collection of American detective yarns from what would have been the Victorian era if they hadn’t chucked the British out some time before
- The Bank Robbers Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (Or Do Anything Right, Really) - ”When the Duffy Brothers were deported from the U.S, they hatched a plan to bring Bonnie-and-Clyde-style armed robbery across the pond. Their plan had more holes than a bullet-riddled safe.”
- How Wine Bricks Saved The U.S. Wine Industry During Prohibition - ”When Prohibition finally went into effect on January 16, 1920, those who owned American vineyards for the sole purpose of turning those grapes into wine faced a dilemma: tear up the vines and plant something else, or try and find a way to still make a profit from the grapes with the hope that ban on booze didn’t last very long.” So they started supplying kits with instructions on what not to do so it didn’t accidentally turn into wine
- Wherefore, qua, bonum: decrypting Indian legalese - A look at the strange and florid forms of English that crop up in the Indian legal system: ”However, the learned counsel appearing for the tenant/JD/petitioner herein cannot derive the fullest succour from the aforesaid acquiescence occurring in the testification of the GPA of the decree holder/landlord, given its sinew suffering partial dissipation from an imminent display occurring in the impugned pronouncement hereat wherewithin unravelments are held qua the rendition recorded by the learned Rent Controller in Rent Petition No. 1-2/1996…” (it carries on like this)
- The Ingenious Ancient Technology Concealed in the Shallows - ”Fish traps have a long history around the world, and a vast network in a Vancouver Island estuary reveals generations of ecological wisdom.” Very clever bit of kit
Happy invoicing!
