If you should fancy a break from the fake snow of the Winter Olympics, this lot might help you pass the time 
Happy invoicing!
- The Shadow and The Ghost - Christine Grimaldi uncovers a tragic tale buried in her family history: ”Nanny, whose real name was Genevieve ‘Jennie’ Grimaldi, née Otranto, was haunted her whole life by the specter of Josephine Carbone, a woman as cruel as she was charismatic. Carbone was better known, to both her followers and her critics, as Reverend Mother… With government records and newspaper clippings, the memories of the few churchgoers who are still alive and the descendants of those who aren’t, I pieced together the narrative of Reverend Mother’s rise to power and her eventual downfall. I learned the stories of families who, like the Otrantos, were all but destroyed by La Cappella dei Miracoli.”
- Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Snowflakes - ”Kenneth Libbrecht is that rare person who, in the middle of winter, gleefully leaves Southern California for a place like Fairbanks, Alaska, where wintertime temperatures rarely rise above freezing. There, he dons a parka and sits in a field with a camera and a piece of foam board, waiting for snow… Now, Libbrecht’s work on snow has crystallized in a new model that attempts to explain why snowflakes and other snow crystals form the way they do.” The article contains links not only to Libbrecht’s paper, but also to his 540-page monograph detailing the full extent of our knowledge of snow crystals
- Earth Has a New Asteroid Companion, but Not for Long - Depends how you define “long”: ”The Trojan asteroid 2020 XL5 is projected to linger in our planet’s vicinity for the next 4,000 years.”
- Astronomers find the first rogue black hole wandering the Milky Way! - ”Exploiting a bizarre property of black holes and gravity, astronomers may have made the first unambiguous detection of an isolated stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy, including a measurement of its mass and distance! If this pans out it will be the first rogue stellar-mass black hole found anywhere that wasn't detected via violently eating a star or some other object.” A bit further away than the asteroid, thankfully
- Globle - If you’ve already done Wordle for the day, have a go at this geographical version: ”Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.”
- Over 100 different species made this 2,200-year-old shipwreck home, study finds - ”Ship's ram from First Punic War serves as ‘ecological memory’ of 2 millennia of underwater life.” The Punic Wars were the ones between Rome and Carthage.
- The Surprisingly Messy Culture Wars Within The New York Times Crossword Puzzle - ”In the 1970s Will Shortz submitted a crossword to the New York Times with a word so scandalous that the editor rejected it. The word: bellybutton.” Now Shortz is the crossword editor, and also has to deal with tricky questions concerning which words are acceptable.
- 'Between real and mythic': an oral history of Jack Reacher - ”Redundant on the cusp of his forties, Lee Child took a wild gamble – and won. Twenty-five years after the release of Killing Floor, the creator of Jack Reacher reflects on his debut alongside the team who published his first novel.” I’ve never actually read any of these, but they sound pretty good - maybe I should give them a go
- Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part V: the output circuitry - Ken Shirriff returns to the classic synth, this time looking at the bit that makes the sound come out: ”It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produce complex, harmonically-rich sounds. In this blog post, I look inside its custom sound chip and explain how the chip's output circuitry works. You might expect it's just a digital output fed into a digital-to-analog converter, but there's much more to it than just that.”
- The Mindfield Cemetery - ”Neighboring the Haywood County courthouse in Brownsville, Tennessee, an imposing structure of gray-painted steel lords over the bucolic landscape. Under perpetual construction for decades, this half-acre construction–with a centerpiece taller than Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers–has been dubbed The Mindfield Cemetery by its maker, Billy Tripp, who plans to be interred there.” One way to pass the time, I suppose The structure can also be seen on Street View.
Happy invoicing!
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