The leaves have almost all gone from the chestnut trees outside my window, but luckily the Internet burgeons with new stuff to read whatever the season 
Happy invoicing!
- The Butcher of Havana - How Herman Marks became main executioner of the Cuban Revolution: ”With a Colt .45 revolver, $400 in cash, and ‘about ten words in Spanish,’ as he later put it, Marks took a boat to Cuba. His plan was as audacious as it was simple: He would join the revolution.”
- Researchers Revise Recipe for Building a Rocky Planet Like Earth - ”Over the past decade, researchers have completely rewritten the story of how gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn form. They’re now debating whether the same process might hold for Earth.” Doesn’t explain why it’s flat though
- The Strange, True Story of John Williams and Charles Pennock - If you thought ornithology was too sedate a pursuit for mysteries, think again: ”In the early 1900s it wasn't unusual for men to suddenly go missing. Among them were two accomplished bird experts whose lives turned out to be surprisingly intertwined.”
- The Thinking Man’s Guide to Hitting a Moose - Ted Genoways gets away from it all: ”That’s when it happened. A full-grown cow moose vaulted from the brush on the right shoulder and into the road. For a moment, she was frozen there, flat and depthless in my headlights… She passed so far through the glass that I actually felt her fur against my face.”
- The Room of the Slaves - Archaeologists at Pompeii have discovered the extremely well-preserved living quarters of what seems to be a family of slaves: ”The room grants us a rare insight into the daily reality of slaves, thanks to the exceptional state of preservation of the room and the possibility of creating plaster casts of beds and other objects in perishable materials which have left their imprint in the cinerite that covered the ancient structures.”
- Spiders are much smarter than you think - ”It’s long been assumed that the smallest brains simply don’t have the capacity to support complex mental processes. But what if they do?” That’ll be nice
- Ancient Comet May Have Turned Chilean Desert Into Glass - ”Nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Chilean coast are covered with oblong fragments of desert glass that researchers who recently studied them say came from a comet’s explosion over the Atacama Desert about 12,000 years ago.”
- “Are You Glad You Did It?”: An Interview with Douglas Wolk - ”Over the last five years, Douglas Wolk has pulled off a feat that few others have attempted, let alone completed: he read every Marvel comic book published since 1961, which adds up to around 27,000 issues, or 540,000 pages.” He has a book on the subject coming out, so at least he has some kind of excuse
- How Serifs Lost the Road War but Won the Streets - The battle of the fonts on British roads: ”The war for Britain’s road signs began in 1958, just before the opening of Britain’s first motorway, the Preston by-pass. The by-pass featured directional and informational road signs designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, which included a typeface called Transport, sans-serif and in mixed case… Over the following years, as Kinneir/Calvert’s motorway signing system was adopted, [David] Kindersley and his supporters kept up a running media battle, promoting an alternative Kindersley design for road signs.”
- An Elaborate Paper Replica Recreates the Heidelberg Letterpress at Full Scale - ”Following a meticulously built collection of meals and household goods, Korean artist Lee Ji-hee returns to a more mechanical subject matter with a life-sized paper model of the Heidelberg letterpress.” Specifically, this appears to be a full-scale model of the Heidelberg 18”×15” platen. We had one of these at the school press (real, not paper) so I’ve operated it, and it’s one of the most truly impressive beasts of a machine that I’ve ever encountered
Happy invoicing!
