Sorry this is a bit late today - I had to go to a funeral down south this morning 
Happy invoicing!
- The Greatest Unsolved Heist in Irish History - Drama in Dublin, 1907: ”Four days before the king was due to arrive in Dublin, the jewels went missing. The story of this theft would eventually involve a sex scandal, conspiracies that pointed the finger at both sides of the political spectrum, the occult, drunken pranks, bankrupt celebrities, sham trials, and an incredibly effective hush campaign from the top rung of the political ladder. The jewels have never been recovered.”
- A near-Earth asteroid may actually be a chunk of the Moon blasted into orbit! - We're being followed: ”The asteroid is called (469219) Kamo'oalewa 2016 HO3. It's a quasi-satellite of Earth, meaning its orbit is very similar to our home planet's so it appears to follow Earth around the Sun. It doesn't really orbit the Earth like the Moon does — it orbits the Sun, just like Earth does — but from certain frames of reference it appears to.”
- Sponge Genes Hint at the Origins of Neurons and Other Cells - ”A new study of gene expression in sponges reveals the complex diversity of their cells as well as some possibly ancient connections between the nervous, immune and digestive systems.”
- Where is the Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay? - The meme-makers move on, but the monkey remains: ”It was an old routine in the news business. Wild animal emerges in developed area, becomes A Thing, gets fake social media. People read voraciously, then move on… I started to write a column off the news that recalled the celebrity monkey, a ‘remember when’ thing. I meant to spend a couple of hours on it. That was five months ago.”
- The Strange Case of the Inaccurate Viewing Figures - ”Here is today’s bold and dangerous statement here on Dirty Feed: Danger Mouse did not get viewing figures of 21 million viewers in 1983.” Turns out you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet
- The Perfect Fire - ”It started with a candle in an abandoned warehouse. It ended with temperatures above 3,000 degrees and the men of the Worcester Fire Department in a fight for their lives.” From 2000, the story of a massive fire in December 1999.
- Making music immortal - ”Pipe organ conservator Jeff Weiler, 62, founded what became JL Weiler, Inc. in 1983. The company’s workshop near 18th and Canal employs ten people, who work to restore, install, repair, and maintain pipe organs… Until the industrial revolution—and arguably until the development of the telephone relay in the late 19th century—these instruments were the most complex machines devised by humans.” An interesting look at the complexity of organs
- The mysterious origins of an uncrackable video game - Investigating an Atari 2600 game: ”Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it’s largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game’s source code to investigate how it was made… The fundamental logic that determines the next square is locked in a table of possible values written into the game’s code… It seems straightforward, but the thing is, no-one can work out how the table was made.” Well, they couldn’t when this article was written in 2019, but in April 2021, Leon Mächler and David Naccache published a paper that claims to solve the mystery: Explaining the Entombed Algorithm
- Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos - Ken Shirriff gets stuck into 80s pop: ”The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer… defined the sound of 1980s pop music, used by bands from A-ha and Michael Jackson to Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston. The DX7's electric piano sound can be heard in over 40% of 1986's top hits… The DX7 used two custom chips: the YM21290 EGS ‘envelope’ chip generated frequency and envelope data, which it fed to the YM212805 OPS ‘operator’ chip that generated the sound waveforms. In this blog post, I investigate the operator chip and how it digitally produced sounds using a technique called FM synthesis.” Bonus linky if you’d like to know more about the DX7: Yamaha DX7 Technical Analysis
- Photographs of The Romanovs’ Final Ball In Color, St Petersburg, Russia 1903 - They may have been rich, but they weren’t rich enough for colour photos in 1903; these have been colourised by Olga Shirnina. ”Czar Nicholas II and his 390 guests partied for 2 days. Day one (February 11) saw dancing, music and food. With the guests loosened up and rested, day 2 (Feb 15th) featured a masked ball. There was a surfeit of sexual excess, debauchery and entitlement for a family whose absolutist rule was hailed by the country’s grateful serfs – they dubbed the Czar ‘Little Father’ – and supported by a complicit church which declared Romanov blood sacred.” This is Princess Olga Orlova. Apparently she’s supposed to be in fancy dress, but given what the rest of them are wearing, it’s hard to tell
Happy invoicing!
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