Bit late today because I've been sorting out a bunch of stuff using Docker; these things always either work perfectly first time, or go wrong in so many different ways simultaneously that it drives you to distraction 
Happy invoicing!
- Life after Deepwater Horizon: the hidden toll of surviving disaster on an oil rig - ”When the drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded in 2010, Stephen Stone escaped with his life. But in the years that followed, he came to feel deeply betrayed by the industry he had once trusted.”
- Time Crystals Made of Light Could Soon Escape the Lab - ”Any crystal, whether a granule of table salt or a diamond necklace, is just a bunch of atoms arranged in a repeating pattern… But what if that pattern was spread across time rather than space?” The quantum physicists are turning their weird ideas into reality, like something in a Borges story
- The weird gets weirder: A fast radio burst traced to a nearby galaxy's globular cluster - Though reality manages to be strange enough without any help: ”One lesson astronomy teaches you is to never sit back and think, ‘Yeah, we totally understand this.’… These are very luminous but incredibly short bursts of radio energy that are generally seen coming from distant galaxies. At first even understanding where there were coming from in the sky was difficult.”
- Comet 67P Harbors Ancient Molecules Of Solar System’s Earliest Primordial Oxygen - ”New analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission to comet 67p/Churyomov-Gerasimenko (67P) has revealed that this well-studied comet actually emits molecular oxygen (O2) from its nucleus.”
- The Academy of British Cover Design - 2022 - Book cover design award nominees. This one for Animal Farm is by Heath Kane.
- Иди Hаxуй - Alex Abramovich on the difficulty of accurately translating Russian and Ukrainian obscenities to English: ”The full range and depth of Russian obscenities – which overlap with Ukrainian obscenities – is notoriously hard to convey written down, even in the original… The word being translated as ‘****’ here is khuy. Idi nakhuy (иди наxуй) – ‘go to dick’ or, more loosely, ‘go sit on a dick’ – is what the Ukrainians (and the road signs) have been saying.”
- By Act of Parliament 1603: One Mulberry Tree - Terence Eden tries to track down the origins of a plaque: ”As I was wandering through the quaint European town of Woodstock, I noticed a most intriguing plaque affixed to one of the houses… This seems like a curiously specific act to pass! This house is № 28 High Street - so why would Parliament pass an act declaring it to be 1 Mulberry Tree?”
- Connect Vermeer - ”Contrary to popular belief, Johannes Vermeer was not a genius working in isolation. He was one of a network of Dutch artists who excelled in painting scenes of everyday life and drew inspiration from each other’s work… By qualifying the probability and strength of each connection between paintings we can determine the strength of the relationships between individual artists.” Good application of data science and machine learning to the Netherlands’ database of art history
- They spent $3 million on a Dune script bible — now what? - ”If you’ve heard of Spice DAO, you might know it as an example of cryptocurrency’s silliest excesses. The group began with a quest to buy one of Jodorowsky’s Dune script bibles: a set of storyboards for what’s sometimes dubbed the ‘greatest sci-fi film never made.’… But when it announced its plans to the world, some awkward phrasing implied it had made one of the worst copyright deals ever conceived — believing it had bought the film rights to Dune by acquiring the book.” It seems they aren’t quite that dumb, but even so, I suspect this tale will still go down in history as extremely silly
- Photos: The Marlboro Man has nothing on these pioneering cowgirls - ”The cowboy is an enduring symbol of American grit and determination… But long before John Wayne and the Marlboro Man, the cowboy ideal was created in traveling spectacles. Some of the biggest stars to break out of the Wild West shows also happened to be women.” Here’s Mildred Douglas riding a steer, circa 1917.
Happy invoicing!
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