Mondays seem to come round a lot quicker at the moment, but I should be back on my nice comfy bench in three weeks 
Happy invoicing!
- The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship - Epic levels of fail in this bizarre story of crypto bros attempting to start a seasteading community: ”In homage to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of bitcoin’s mysterious inventor (or inventors), they renamed the ship the MS Satoshi. They hoped it would become home to people just like them: digital nomads, startup founders and early bitcoin adopters… But converting a cruise ship into a new society proved more challenging than envisaged. The high seas, while appearing borderless and free, are, in fact, some of the most tightly regulated places on Earth.” Bonus linky: in this Twitter thread, maritime law expert Samira Nadkarni reads the article with mounting incredulity
- Solar ‘Superflares’ Rocked Earth Less Than 10,000 Years Ago—and Could Strike Again - ”Although our sun is considered a quiet star, it is now thought to have repeatedly pelted our planet with enormous eruptions in the not too distant past. Could another occur in the near future?” Something to look forward to
- Porno Hustlers Of The Atari Age - Despite its chunky graphics, people made porn games for the Atari 2600: ”October 14, 1982 saw what was then the largest protest in video game history when a crowd of 200-300 Native Americans, feminists, and anti-porn activists gathered outside a trade show in New York to protest the offensive Atari 2600 game Custer’s Revenge… As I pieced the story together, I realized it was too outrageous and unbelievable to be treated as a mere footnote in a video. I needed to tell the whole story, from its brashly optimistic beginnings to its unlikely conclusion. This is the history of the Mystique line of pornographic Atari 2600 games like you’ve never heard it before.”
- Incunabula on Twitter - HT to DaveB for this excellent thread explaining how books came to be: ”European civilization is built on ham and cheese, which allowed protein to be stored throughout the icy winters. Without this, urban societies in most of central Europe would simply not have been possible. This is also why we have hardback books. Here's why.”
- The Last Glimpses of California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias - ”Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land, creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Here, the last of those rogue souls offer a glimpse of their otherworldly residences—and the tail end of a grand social experiment.” Sic transit gloria mundi
- New, Giant Carnivorous Dinosaur Was a Terror to Smaller Tyrannosaurs - ”Despite their fearsome reputation, tyrannosaurs were not always the largest or fiercest carnivores of the Mesozoic world. For tens of millions of years, the earlier relatives of Tyrannosaurus lived in the shadow of larger carnivores with serrated, knife-like teeth. These predators were the carcharodontosaurs, or ‘shark-toothed lizards,’ and paleontologists have just named a new species from a pivotal point in dinosaurian history.”
- A Cryptologic Mystery - How a failure in a random number generator may have helped the FBI track down the Russian illegals arrested in 2010: ”The Cuban numbers station is somewhat legendary. It is a powerful station, operated by Cuba's intelligence directorate but co-located with Radio Habana's transmitters near Bauta, Cuba, and is easily received with even very modest equipment throughout the US… In 2007, I noticed an odd anomaly: some messages completely lacked the digit 9 ("nueve"). Most messages had, as they always did and as you'd expect with OTP ciphertext, a uniform distribution of the digits 0-9. But other messages, at random times, suddenly had no 9s at all.”
- In the Absence of Cruise Ships, Humpbacks Have Different Things to Say - Lockdown and reduced maritime traffic seems to have changed what whales have to say to one another: ”Researchers don’t know exactly what the whales were saying, of course, but the discovery that the proportions of call types changed is intriguing on its own.”
- when will my concept of “linear time” come back from the war? - ”Time’s gone weird, hasn’t it? Hasn’t time gone weird? I’m really struggling with it at the moment. I don’t know what day it is. I’m not sure whether it’s day. It’s still March 2020. It’s 2022 in 4 months. It’s been Wednesday for years. I’ll be dead soon. There are no weekends, and no weeks. I’m always at work. I’m always at home. Nothing has any edges. Time is not so much a flat circle as an amorphous blob, a vague nebula I hover suspended within where things that happened last year feel like yesterday and things that happened yesterday feel like last year.” Nat Guest ponders how lockdown affects our sense of time.
- In the weeks before 9/11, a nightshift electrician took these haunting photos inside the WTC - ”In June 2001 an immigrant from Estonia named Konstantin Petrov landed a job as an electrician at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower of the World Trade Center… During that summer, Petrov took hundreds of photographs inside the north tower during his shifts, mostly of empty offices, elevator fixtures, stairwells, and the deserted dining room of Windows on the World, with table settings in place for the next day’s service. Windows on the World occupied the 106th and 107th floors of Tower 1. Many of Petrov’s photos capture daybreak blazing into the ghostly dining rooms and sweeping views of the dormant city below.” Petrov left work just as the attacks began, but was killed in a motorbike crash a year later. His personal online photo album is still up though: Windows on the World
Happy invoicing!
<- TV, Radio, interweb, satellites, national grid.
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