- How the FBI Discovered a Real-Life Indiana Jones in, of All Places, Rural Indiana - When the FBI's Fine Arts Program received a tipoff about a private collection of Native American items, they found more than they bargained for: ”The person, who’d seen the collection, kept referring to it as ‘huge.’ For Carpenter, who’d worked art crimes for five years, including private collection cases, a large collection would’ve meant 100 items. So what’s huge? 200 items? 400? ‘No, man. A lot more than that,’ he told Carpenter. ‘I think it’s about 200,000 pieces.’”
- What Whale Barnacles Know - ”Individual whales have been known to collect up to 450 kilograms of barnacles. That’s an enormous mass, but relative to a 30-tonne humpback, it would weigh only about as much as an extra layer of clothes… Here’s what we don’t know about whale barnacles, at least with any certainty: just about everything else.” Now scientists such as Larry Taylor are trying to work out what we may be able to learn from them.
- Coca-Cola did not create Santa - ”Every Christmas the same story goes around social media; Coca-Cola invented Santa or at least gave him a whole new look in the 1930s… But this is nonsense.” This gun-toting Santa from 1912, long before Coke started their Santa ads, does look pretty much standard.
- Splitting Paper in the AAS Conservation Lab - ”Paper splitting, as unlikely as it may seem, is exactly what it sounds like: one sheet of paper is separated along its thickness to form two sheets, which each have the same length and width as the original but are about half as thick. This may sound like an impossible magic trick, but with extensive knowledge of the properties of paper and many hours of careful practice, paper splitting is well within reach.” I look forward to seeing this technique put to use on The Repair Shop
- The Man Who Wouldn’t Die - ”The plot to kill Michael Malloy for life-insurance money seemed foolproof—until the conspirators actually tried it.” This chap could give Rasputin a run for his money
- Ideal monitor rotation for programmers - xssfox has found the ideal application for Linux on the desktop: ”We have a little tool called xrandr (x resize and rotate). We can use it to rotate the screen around to any angle we want. In practice I couldn’t get this to work on my MacBook. My desktop on the otherhand it had no problems. So lets try a few out.” This 45° rotation proved to be suboptimal.
- Greg's Brass History Page - ”In conjunction with Al's Tenor Horn Page and Al's Mellophone Page, we are proud to present histories of all Brass Band instruments, written by Greg Monks!” Everything you ever wanted to know about the shiny section of the orchestra
- Virtual BBC Micro - ” An interactive 3D model of the BBC Micro (1981). Choose from 100s of games and experience the sights and sounds of the original hardware. Retrocomputing for the metaverse! Created for the BBC Micro's 40th, Virtualbeeb is FOSS built on the jsbeeb emulator by Matt Godbolt, Paul Malin, Anthony Mercer, and Dominic Pajak.” Now you can waste the rest of the day playing Frak!
- Yamaha DX7 reverse-engineering, part III: Inside the log-sine ROM - Part three of Ken Shirriff’s teardown of the chips that powered the venerable 1980s synth: ”In this blog post, I examine the log-sine ROM that digitally produces sine waves inside one of these chips… The idea is that you start with a sine wave (the carrier signal) and perturb it with another signal (the modulating signal). The modulating signal changes the phase (and thus the frequency) of the carrier, creating complex harmonic structures.”
- Ken Bower: American Flowers - ”As an avid outdoorsman I have coalesced my passion and love for the outdoors and photography. Traveling to extremely remote places that are rarely photographed drive me to push beyond the limitations of foul weather and rugged terrain to capture my impressions.” This gallery shows the remains of a WWII United States Air Force base in Greenland.
Happy invoicing!
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