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Monday Links from Santa's Grotto vol. DCXXV

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    Monday Links from Santa's Grotto vol. DCXXV

    One problem with Christmas being at the end of the week is that most of the lighthearted festive stuff hasn't been published yet, but we'll probably all be in lockdown again by teatime so you'll be glad of anything to pass the time
    • The Company Man - ”Tse Chi Lop doesn’t look like the biggest drug lord in history. He looks like a bedraggled, exhausted, late-middle-aged trader in commodities, which is exactly what he is. Tse’s commodities just happen to be high-margin, addictive, illegal drugs—heroin, ketamine and methamphetamine… The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that Sam Gor’s annual revenue could be as high as $21 billion, the same as Citibank’s.” A handy guide to building a massive crime syndicate
    • The Beloved Mesolithic Girl - ”The girl’s mother and father, accompanied by their community, took her tiny body to a marble cave, just upslope from the river. Inside, the cave was beautiful. It ascended to a high point in the center, the walls draped by flowstone ribbons. A small pit was dug in the middle. The baby was wrapped in a garment decorated with over 60 pierced shell beads and three pendants. The pendants looked huge next to the tiny infant, but she was worth it. She had been a part of their group… This is what my scientific colleagues and I imagine unfolded at what is today known as the Arma Veirana cave.”
    • The Soviets turned the Volga River into a machine. Then the machine broke. - ”The project was one of the largest nature-transforming schemes in history: put together, the artificial reservoirs on the Volga are about as big as Lake Erie. It tried to harness the river to provide the Russian people with necessary things: energy, transportation, and water. But it tried to do too much.” Now do the Colorado River
    • That time Catherine the Great championed smallpox vaccinations - ”During her long reign, Catherine the Great transformed Russia into a powerhouse of Europe. She was also a leader in public health policy, championing a nationwide vaccination campaign against smallpox at a time when many viewed the practice with distrust.” Be like Catherine the Great
    • Vanishing Spirits – The Dried Remains of Single Malt Scotch - An intriguing portfolio from photographer Ernie Button: ”The idea for this project occurred while putting a used Scotch glass into the dishwasher. I noted a film on the bottom of a glass and when I inspected closer, I noted these fine, lacey lines filling the bottom. What I found through some experimentation is that these patterns and images that you see can be created with the small amount of Single-Malt Scotch left in a glass after most of it has been consumed… It’s a little like snowflakes in that every time the Scotch dries, the glass yields different patterns and results.” This is the dried residue of The Macallan
    • ‘Happy Christmas, Ange!’ The nation’s most-watched TV episode - ”It’s 35 years since the most viewed British TV programme ever aired. James White takes a look back at an iconic piece of television history.” My family's more Coronation Street; I think we contributed to these viewing figures, though
    • Peking Man - From Michael Marshall's Our Human Story New Scientist newsletter, the mystery of what happened to the famous human fossils: ”In a system of caves called Zhoukoudian, south-west of Beijing, researchers uncovered a treasure trove of hominin remains. First teeth, then pieces of skulls were extracted during the 1920s and 1930s… So it’s extraordinarily unfortunate that these remains have been missing for 80 years. They haven’t been seen since 1941.”
    • Archaeologists Have Unearthed Exciting Secrets on Haida Gwaii - From Peking Man to American Dog: ”Archaeological excavations have revealed the oldest domestic dog remains ever reported in the Americas, roughly 11,000-year-old stone tools, and the tantalizing signs of far more to come.”
    • Townscaper - Oskar Stålberg has released a demo version of his city builder game running in the browser. There's quite a few Easter eggs tucked away in there; for example, if you build a white-and-red tower, it will turn into a lighthouse
    • 22 Photos Round the Christmas Tree – Mid-Century Snapshots of Joy and Plenty - ”Robert E. Jackson had wanted to call this album from his fabulous archive of snapshots ‘What Happens Around the Christmas Tree, Stays Around the Christmas Tree. ‘But it is rather a long title,’ he concedes. ” But so is the one Flashbak have given it? Ah well, Happy Christmas from this *checks notes* um… I’m going to guess at “member of the Provisional IRA”


    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    You can leave scotch in the glass?

    Excellent as always
    Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

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