Still snowy here, though the thaw's setting in. I'm staying in the nice warm World Wide Web for now though 
Happy invoicing!
- The Depths She’ll Reach - ”Nearly 6,000 people have climbed Mount Everest. Only a few dozen have freedived 100 meters under the ocean.” The story of Alenka Artnik, who has battled suicidal depression to become a record-breaking freediver.
- How to go to the toilet, medieval style? - ”Obviously, human biology hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages. Human needs are human needs. To relieve oneself in the countryside, one could go behind a bush. But in cities, things were more complicated.” Lucie Laumonier explores the options available should you find yourself needing the toilet in the Middle Ages.
- The ancient origins of glass - ”Featuring ingots, shipwrecks, pharaohs and an international trade in colors, the material’s rich history is being traced using modern archaeology and materials science.”
- Scotland’s Prehistoric Climate Crisis - What happened to the coastal population of Scotland around 8,000 years ago? ”Archaeologists previously thought that these foragers from the Mesolithic—a transitional period before agriculture became established—abandoned the coast roughly 8,000 years ago because of a tsunami that was triggered by undersea landslides near Norway… [A new study] suggests that the tsunami was just a tipping point for people already struggling with gradually rising seas and earlier climatic events.”
- Robot Arm Clock - ”A deliberately over-engineered timepiece provided a satisfying distraction for a busy software engineer.” HT to WTFH for this project: a robot arm that moves the hands on a broken clock to the correct position to tell the time
- From Cows to Covid: The Spooky Origins of Vaccines - ”Back in the 18th century, it was a wonder how anyone ever survived a trip to the doctor. Many didn’t… Vaccination, too, arose during this frenzied period of trial and error, which, if you squint a little, looks a lot like the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak, when desperate doctors were willing to prescribe just about anything to save their patients.” Brendan Borrell on the history of vaccination.
- The fry universe - ”You probably like some types of fries more than others. The 3D modelling of various fry shapes illuminates why this might be.” One thing to note about this interactive exploration of chips is that America doesn't yet seem to have discovered crinkle-cut. And now I want chips
- BBC Micro Elite source code - I linked to Mark Moxon's fully-commented Elite 6502 source code on GitHub a while back, but it's now beautifully presented with a variety of supporting info and tools on this site: ”My hope is that this site will be useful for those who want to learn more about Elite and what makes it tick. It is provided on an educational and non-profit basis, with the aim of helping people appreciate one of the most iconic games of the 8-bit era.”
- The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's clever exponential circuit, reverse-engineered - Ken Shirriff continues his teardown of the DX7: ”Because microprocessors weren't fast enough in the early 1980s, the DX7 used two custom digital chips: the EGS "envelope" chip generated frequency and envelope data, which it fed to the OPS "operator" chip that generated the sound waveforms. A key part of the OPS chip is an exponential circuit, which is used for frequency calculation and envelope application. In this blog post, I examine this circuit—implemented by a ROM, shifter, and other circuitry—in detail and extract the ROM's data.”
- Abandoned Romania - ”Explore Romania's fascinating abandoned places in the galleries below!” Matthew Christopher of Abandoned America ventures into the Balkans. This is inside Fort 13 Jilava Prison
Happy invoicing!
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