While you're waiting for your call-up papers to go and defend some faceless corporation's investments in Ukraine (when did it lose the "the"?) you can be having a look at this mishmash of stuff 
Happy invoicing!
- The Missing Persons Investigator Who Went Missing Herself - ”Andrea Knabel spent countless hours searching for missing people. Then one day she was the one who disappeared. Her family and friends—and half the internet—are still searching.”
- AI Outraces Human Champs at the Video Game Gran Turismo - ”Self-driving cars can learn to complete a lap at the fastest possible speed… But this becomes a much knottier problem when the automated driver has to share space with other cars. Now scientists have unraveled the challenge virtually by training an artificial intelligence program to outpace human competitors at the ultrarealistic racing game Gran Turismo Sport.” Not sure games where the NPCs can always beat you will take off, though F1 could get interesting if they stick a couple of perfectly self-driving cars in among the humans
- Watch this mama chimp treat her son’s open wound by applying insect “poultice” - ”In November 2019, Alessandra Mascaro was observing a community of chimpanzees in the Loango National Park in Gabon… A chimp named Suzee was inspecting a wound on the foot of her son, Sia. Suzee suddenly caught an insect from a nearby leaf, put it into her mouth for a moment, and then pressed it to Sia's wound.” Some interesting observations of the practice of medicine in chimp communities
- The Bygone Era Of The Hotel Detective - ”Up until not quite so long ago, it was common practise for most grand hotels to keep on their books, alongside the porters, elevator attendants, chefs, chambermaids and bellhops – an in-house detective… A far cry from modern security guards and bouncers, they were often retired city policemen, who would draw on their years of experience to prowl the corridors and survey the lobby to protect both the guests, and the reputation of the hotel.” They also inspired some great pulp fiction covers
- Accidental implosion yields new measurement for ocean's deepest point - ”A scientific instrument that collapsed in the deep sea allowed scientists to make one of the most precise calculations yet for the abyss known as Challenger Deep.” Spoiler: it's deeper than we thought.
- Olympic skiers and snowboarders are competing on 100% fake snow – the science of how it’s made and how it affects performance - I told you it was fake: ”The winter Olympics conjure up images of snowy mountain ranges… Barring some extremely anomalous weather patterns, the mountains surrounding the snow events for the Beijing Winter Olympics will be tones of brown and green and nearly devoid of snow. The region typically receives only a few inches of snowfall in each winter month.”
- Superb Owl Sunday VI - ”A special Sunday event: our sixth annual photographic essay celebrating such magnificent birds of prey. These nocturnal hunters hail from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America and are captured here in photos from recent years.” This horned owl seems unimpressed, if not positively disgruntled.
- North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet - ”For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea's strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems… At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country's networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom's digital connections to the outside world.” If you've been missing your daily updates on the Respected Comrade's activities, this guy P4x will be the reason
- Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 6: the control registers - Ken Shirriff's not done yet with the 80s synth: ”In this blog post, I look inside its custom "OPS" sound chip and explain the control registers for this chip. By reverse-engineering the circuitry, I found a few undocumented test functions.”
- Heart For Art’s Sake: 17th Century Emblems Of Virtue And Sin - Exploring an emblem book dating from 1654: ”The Revised Compendium and Engraving Booklet [with] hundreds of spiritual and secular heart seals/mirrors for a particular illustration of the Virtues and Vices presented and explained with hundreds of poetic conceits by Fabian Athyrus, devout in the praiseworthy Intellectual Arts.” This one has a bonus sheep
Happy invoicing!
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