If you were wondering, your next Bank Holiday Monday is on April 18th 
Happy invoicing!
- House of Cards - ”The collapse of Champlain Towers South was unprecedented. The tower wasn’t particularly old or under major construction. There was no earthquake, gas explosion or terrorist attack to blame… In the six months since the tragedy, the Miami Herald reconstructed the collapse using photos, videos, call records and testimony of key eyewitnesses.” Excellent multimedia (do we still use that word?) exploration of last year's collapse of an apartment building in Miami.
- Flying Fish and Aquarium Pets Yield Secrets of Evolution - ”New studies reveal the ancient, shared genetic ‘grammar’ underpinning the diverse evolution of fish fins and tetrapod limbs.” As they came first, I’m going to start calling my limbs “fins, actually”
- Inside psychogenic death, the phenomenon of "thinking" yourself to death - ”In 1967, a woman was admitted to Baltimore City Hospital, complaining about shortness of breath, chest pains, nausea, and dizziness. She was 22 years old… The midwife who'd delivered her had also delivered two other children that day. She told the girls' parents that all three children had been hexed. The first girl would die before her sixteenth birthday. The second would die before her twenty-first. The third—the woman in this hospital—would die before she turned twenty-three.” And she did, for no obvious medical reason
- Cheese Accounting ? - ”I won a year’s supply of cheese in a contest in May of 2019.” Renowned librarian Jessamyn West (formerly of MetaFilter) details how she coped with receiving 25lbs of assorted cheese every three months for a year
- Literature Clock - By Johannes Enevoldsen: ”Clock using time quotes from the literature, based on work and idea by Jaap Meijers.” Good way to find out what the time is and simultaneously get ideas for something to read
- Scientists Settled a Century-Old Family Drama Using DNA From Postcards - ”Swiss forensic geneticists analyzed DNA recovered from postage stamps dating back to World War I and solved a century-old paternity puzzle.”
- Strained Relationships: Bewes & Bolam - ”The death in November 2017 of Rodney Bewes elicited yet another wave of media interest in the fact that he and James Bolam, his Likely Lads and Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? co-star, had not spoken to each other for nearly forty years. The truth, however, is that this kind of enduring enmity between sitcom stars is surprisingly common… The Bewes-Bolam relationship is indeed a case in point, because - rather than in spite - of the fact that it is actually rather more complex than either actor has ever admitted.” Graham McCann uncovers the history behind the difficult relationship, exploding a few myths along the way.
- 60 Years Of Deception And Land Sales In California City: 7 Takeaways From My Investigative Podcast - Emily Guerin on a real estate scam that has run and run: ”In a small town in the Mojave Desert, salespeople were making tens of millions of dollars hawking empty desert land to unsuspecting buyers by convincing them the area would boom one day… It seemed like such an anachronism, a relic of Southern California post-war hubris, or maybe even Gold Rush-style boosterism. How could this be happening in the 21st century?”
- My Inky Dashboard - Matthew Somerville (of traintimes.org.uk fame, along with many other useful sites) hooks up a Raspberry Pi to a colour eInk display: ”I saw a tweet from Andrew Godwin on New Year’s Day that included a picture of his eInk weather board display. I knew he had a three-colour one in the past, but I didn’t realise you could now get multi-colour ones… It all worked smoothly – although it was at this point I was also restarting nginx on traintimes.org.uk and made the mistake of shutting down that entire server, rather than my Raspberry Pi…”
- Meaning on a lamp-post - Paul Slade on the streets of London: ”I’m always fascinated by the street art I find when I'm out walking around London. I'm thinking here not just of graffiti - though there's certainly plenty of that - but also the home-made notices people display in their windows and the protest stickers attached to every available surface along the pavement… Once you start noticing them, they become like a muttered conversation you can overhear the city having with itself, always there as a background hum but only occasionally grabbing your full attention.”
Happy invoicing!
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