- My Bizarre Reign as New York’s King of “Virgin Russian Hair” - Vijai Maheshwari on an extremely peculiar Plan B: ”I ended up buying shiny blond ponytails from a matronly hairdresser with a blond beehive hairdo… When I got to FedEx, the managers told me it wasn’t possible to ship the hair to Australia without first getting a document stating that the hair was lice-free. So I had to find an epidemiological institute in Kyiv and take the hair there, where friendly babushkas in white lab coats, who had probably been working there since the Soviet days, went through each ponytail checking for lice before approving them and handing me the certificate so that the hair could be shipped.”
- Weird chemistry is making the Earth's interior cool faster than thought - ”Over billions of years the Earth has cooled. Though some heat is generated through various processes like radioactivity, that heat in the core leaks out. It warms up the bottom of the mantle, which then transports that energy extremely slowly up to the Earth's surface where it radiates away into space… A team of Earth scientists just investigated a key property of that transport, and was shocked to discover that it's far more efficient than previously thought.”
- Occult Uncle: Dennis Wheatley (Part one), The Making of The Devil Rides Out: Dennis Wheatley (Part two), The Making of To the Devil…a Daughter: Dennis Wheatley (Part three) - KB Morris on the bestselling novelist: ”In an effort to learn more about the occult in the UK, his friend Tom Driberg introduced him to Aleister Crowley, an infamous occultist and magician. Wheatley met Crowley in May 1934, and they went for lunch at the Hungaria restaurant on Regent Street… Further correspondence indicates that Wheatley was using work as an excuse not to see Crowley again, and their acquaintance developed no further.”
- How to make a wallet out of a juice carton - Hannah Frishberg presents a DIY alternative to fancy purses: ”In 9th grade, my friend Finnley went to pay for a knish and I thought to myself ‘Why is Finnley carrying around the top of an orange juice carton,’ when I realized it was her wallet. I inquired, she initiated me, and I haven’t stored my money in anything but a used juice carton since.” This is from 2017, but last week Hannah was mugged and her handbag taken at knifepoint. The next day she returned to the scene… and her juice carton wallet was lying on the ground, still with her money and cards inside, having apparently been discarded by the mugger who assumed it was just trash
- Virtual Valve Museum - ”The Virtual Valve Museum is the online presentation of my personal collection. This collection has been assembled over a number of years, more seriously from around 1998 onwards, with the decision to share images of it with the world being taken in 1999. The first version this website, then called JMH's Virtual Valve Museum went online during 1999 and I have maintained a web presence since then.”
- John Peel Roulette - ”I noticed there are over 200 full John Peel shows on YouTube… As I wouldn't know where to start, I wrote this script to load a random show at a random moment. Just click the button above to hear one.” I just got King Tubby from 2 November 1978, which I very possibly listened to when it was originally broadcast
- The Mystery of the West Texas Geyser Deepens - ”Around New Year’s Eve, a well on a ranch in southern Crane County roared to life. It blew 25,000 barrels a day of briny water one hundred feet into the air. By itself, this was odd. There is no known high-pressure zone of salty water out there, at least none that exists naturally.” So far, no search of the records has revealed who owns the well, but it was at first thought to be one belonging to Chevron so they’ve ended up with the bill
- EVEREST - First Ascent by Max Niblock and Stefan Vitasović - The website is by them, not the ascent. It’s an interactive multimedia thingy about the 1953 expedition, and also Mallory and Irvine's 1920s expeditions which may have been the first ascent.
- SkyBot - Interesting project: ”I built a system to take photos of all of the airplanes that fly over my house. Most of these planes are passing by at more than 30,000 feet! It uses ADS-B to track where the aircraft are relative to the camera, points the camera in the right direction and snaps a photo. The Photo get uploaded to Azure, where there are some serverless functions that are running that detect where the aircraft is in the image and make a thumbnail. Everything gets sent into a DB and served up using Azure App Services.”
- Polar bears — Dmitry Kokh - ”In September 2021 we got back from long awaited trip to Chukotka and Wrangel Island. Being the farest and most Eastern part of Russian Arctic, this place is very hard to get but also difficult to forget. We traveled by the sailing yacht along the coast and covered more than 1200 miles of untouched landscapes, villages lost in time, spots with various fauna and seas full of life. I always wanted to get some nice shots of polar bears, and that was the main target of our expedition. We expected to meet them mostly on Wrangel Island, famous all around the world for being home for many bears. Not this year, as we found out later - maybe because of the very cold summer. But nature always sending you something when you least expect it - when we passed through the Kolyuchin Island near the Northern coast of Chukotka, we saw some movements in the windows of the abandoned windows there. And when we got close - those were bears!” There goes the neighbourhood
Happy invoicing!
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