Another busy day. Thank goodness there's a Bank Holiday next week 
Happy invoicing!
- The Legend of the Music Tree - How a huge tree cut down in Belize in 1965 became the most prized wood in the world: ”The sound was resonant and true. But the most remarkable part was the look of the thing: Its back and sides rippled like a full moon reflecting off a dead calm sea. Mesmerizing.”
- Scientists spy on Mount Etna with fiber-optic cables - ”Towering 11,000 feet above a million humans, Mount Etna is one of the most thoroughly monitored volcanoes on Earth… Researchers described how they used a technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, to pick up seismic signals that conventional sensors missed.” Interesting use of dark cable
- Key particle weighs in a bit heavy, confounding physicists - ”The grand explanation physicists use to describe how the universe works may have some major new flaws to patch after a fundamental particle was found to have more mass than scientists thought.” I daresay they’ll think up something preposterous to explain it soon
- The Underground Nuclear Test Site at Novaya Zemlya - ”This is an annotated tour of Russia's Central Testing Ground at Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean… Comparing U.S. and Russian test sites helps illustrate how both countries approached nuclear testing during the Cold War, how they manage their stockpiles today in an era without explosive testing, and the continuing importance of arms control in preventing a return to the shared dangers of the arms race.”
- Back of Your Hand - A simple but clever idea for a game: point the map at an area you know well, and it will ask you to pinpoint five places. This turns out to be harder than you might think. Well, it is for me, anyway; just now, I was some distance out locating a road I can see from my living room window
- An Expedition into the Mystery of Crank Caverns - Folklorist John Reppion tries to untangle the various stories and legends surrounding a complex of sandstone tunnels near St. Helens, Merseyside: ”The Rainford Delph Quarry was a sandstone quarry near Crank, in use from the mid-1700s until the early 20th century. Excavated at multiple levels, mines there broke through into pre-existing caverns and tunnels in several places. This now long-abandoned network of tunnels is known locally as Crank Caverns. A wealth of folklore has grown up around the caverns, or perhaps more accurately, has emerged from within them… Let’s explore these weird caverns in depth. Via the remote safety of words on a screen, of course.”
- How Nobel Candidate Javier Marías Became King of a Caribbean Island Because of a Novel - ”There are so many bizarre ingredients to this story, I don’t even know where to begin—except with a disclaimer. Everything here is true, even the parts that seem the least likely. In this instance, truth is not only stranger than fiction, but fiction made the truth even stranger.”
- The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads - ”Octavio Rettig, an underground practitioner of 5-MeO-DMT, a hallucinogenic substance derived from Sonoran Desert toads, claims that he has revived a lost Mesoamerican ritual.” Licking toads will make you claim a lot of things
- MuscleWiki - A simple idea for a site, but useful if you feel the need to exercise: click on a muscle group, and it will show you workouts of various kinds suitable for developing it.
- Collector’s Item du Jour: Japanese Matchbox Art of the 1920s - ”In the 1920s and 1930s, matchboxes in Japan were a miniature billboard in the palm of your hand, promising a glamorous modern life of smoky bars, marcelled hair, and nude women entwined around giant goblets of wine. Produced with a traditional woodblock, the artwork showed influences from Bauhaus and Expressionism, making them a fascinating blend of East and West.”
Happy invoicing!
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