Far too many meetings today, i.e. more than zero 
Happy invoicing!
- The Great Cottonmouth-Catching Get-Rich-Quick Scheme of 1956 - ”As a reptile-obsessed teen, I ran away to hunt lizards in the Everglades, then hatched a plan to milk venom from deadly snakes. It went even more comically wrong than you're thinking.” An amusing memoir by Ron Gollobin.
- A New Tool for Finding Dark Matter Digs Up Nothing - Dark matter seems to be even harder to find than ever: ”Physicists are devising clever new ways to exploit the extreme sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. But so far, they’ve seen no signs of exotica.”
- Bones, Bones: How to Articulate a Whale - Good, if smelly, things come to those who wait: ”I’m walking with my dog and the phone rings. It’s Jessie Huggins, stranding coordinator for Cascadia Research Collective. ‘A whale washed ashore an hour south of Seattle,’ she says. ‘Do you want it?’ I’ve been waiting two years for her call. Alongside Rus Higley, a marine biologist and director of Highline College’s Marine Science and Technology Center, I’m leading an effort to hang a whale skeleton in the science building at Seattle Pacific University”
- Big Glass Microphone - An interesting project from Stamen Design and the V&A: ”Infrastructure is all around us. Some we can see, like roads, and some we can't, like radio waves. Big Glass Microphone looks at the intersection between these two kinds of infrastructure by visualizing the vibrations in a five kilometer long fiber optic cable buried a meter or two underneath the campus of Stanford University.”
- Kyiv - The war diary of Yevgenia Belorusets - ”People discuss the safest spots of apartments—where to sleep and where, under any circumstances, not to. These thoughts infect my own. Lately, I have been sleeping in my small study until the sirens start wailing between four and five in the morning, at which point I move to the corridor, where I have spread blankets out on the floor… I was already asleep in the corridor when my mother woke me. ‘Something is burning. Can’t you smell it?’ she asked in the low voice that she reserves for real danger.” Daily updates from Ukraine.
- It’s a Great Time to Hoard Nickels - ”Russia supplies more than 20 percent of the world’s high-quality nickel, which is a crucial component in everything from stainless steel to pipes to the batteries that power electric cars. But with Ukraine under siege, companies in the West have been wary of buying Russian nickel… Some Americans found a roundabout way to make some money: hoarding nickels. Yes, the coin is worth just five cents, but the metal it contains—75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel—has long been worth more than that.”
- Farmers Stealing Tanks - Yes, there’s a lot of Ukraine-related content this week; there’s been a lot going on there. Now, you can get in on the action with this game in which you’re a Ukrainian farmer: ”Steal a Tank that has run out of fuel and bring it back to your shed… Drink Nemiroff to double your speed for 10 seconds. Destroy other tanks by ramming them with a stolen tank to get a free life.”
- Wordle, 15 Million Tweets Later - This article by Robert Lesser is the most exhaustive analysis of the word game’s presence on Twitter, with cool visualisations: ”Players post their scores, triggering others to learn, play, and tweet as well. What started with a few dozen people quickly turned into over a million unique accounts tweeting emoji grids… From the first (formally) shared Wordle game on Dec 15, 2021 until the most recent data on Mar 5, 2022, there have been 14,907,307 tweets.”
- A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70 instant camera - Ken Shirriff turns his attention from synths to photography: ”The revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world's first instant SLR camera… I'm helping the openSX70 project by reverse-engineering the chips on the exposure control board. This board contains three surface-mount ICs: a chip to read the light intensity from a photodiode, a timer chip to control how long the shutter blades are open, and a power control IC to drive the motor and solenoids.”
- Wonder, Hungry Wolves, and the Whimsy of Resilience: Arthur Rackham’s Haunting 1920 Illustrations for Irish Fairy Tales - ”In 1920, in the middle of Ireland’s guerrilla war for independence, weeks before Bloody Sunday, a book both very new and very old appeared and swiftly disappeared into eager hands — a lyrical, lighthearted, yet poignant retelling of ancient Irish myths by the Irish poet and novelist James Stephens… Carrying that world are sixteen exquisite color plates and two dozen black-and-white illustrations by Arthur Rackham.” This one is from the story The Wooing of Becfola.
Happy invoicing!
