Enjoy it while you can - it'll be four-and-a-half weeks before the next Bank Holiday! 
Happy invoicing!
- A Crime Beyond Belief - ”A Harvard-trained lawyer was convicted of committing bizarre home invasions. Psychosis may have compelled him to do it. But in a case that became a public sensation, he wasn’t the only one who seemed to lose touch with reality.” A bizarre tale of a mentally ill lawyer and incompetent police.
- Elegant Six-Page Proof Reveals the Emergence of Random Structure - ”Two young mathematicians have astonished their colleagues with a full proof of the Kahn-Kalai conjecture — a sweeping statement about how structure emerges in random sets and graphs.” The patterns… they're real!
- Trained Russian Navy Dolphins are Protecting Black Sea Naval Base, Satellite Photos Show - ”Russia has deployed trained dolphins during its invasion of Ukraine to protect a Black Sea naval base, USNI News has learned.” I have no idea how much credence to give this story, but hey, they have dolphins on the USS Enterprise, so…
- Did immigration cause the fall of Rome? - ”There’s a particular dread one feels whenever a Conservative MP voices an opinion about history. It’s usually some slightly sweeping statement that was once widely believed but now only raises a groan… In the case of Boris Johnson earlier this month, they will suggest that mass migration helped finish ancient Rome.” And like everything else Johnson says, it's not true.
- {Shan, Shui}* - From the GitHub repo: ”{Shan, Shui}* is inspired by traditional Chinese landscape scrolls… and uses noises and mathematical functions to model the mountains and trees from scratch. It is written entirely in javascript and outputs Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.” Clever stuff by Lingdong Huang
- The Hustler at the End of the World - ”Behind the pandemic’s supply chain nightmare were the go-getters, middlemen, and scammers. One man tried to move massive amounts of PPE for money, but found so much more.” How one man tried to exploit the pandemic through greed, and ended up learning the value of true friendship. Are we supposed to like this guy by the end, or what?
- Don’t forget the other Big Dig - Those of us who are unfamiliar with Boston MA probably don't know what the Big Dig is, but the construction of the Middlesex Canal between 1790 and 1803 is still an interesting tale of engineering and politics: ”Superintendent Baldwin had no instruments. He asked a self-taught Woburn surveyor, Samuel Thompson, to tackle this with his crude gear… His survey said the Concord River was lower than the Merrimack, but it turned out to be almost 30 feet higher when someone else double-checked. Obviously Baldwin needed to find better talent.”
- London’s lost ringways - More engineering, this time urban motorways: ”A monstrous plan to build major motorways through some of London’s greatest neighborhoods fell apart. But the price was the birth of the NIMBY movement, and a permanent ceiling on Britain’s infrastructure ambitions.”
- A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time - ”The history of computing could arguably be divided into three eras: that of mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. Minicomputers provided an important bridge between the first mainframes and the ubiquitous micros of today. This is the story of the PDP-11, the most influential and successful minicomputer ever.”
- Mary in The Void: Late 19th to early 20th Century Italian Ex-Votos - ”In these ex-votos (ex voto suscepto, ‘from the vow made’) from late 19th to early 20th Century Liguria, Italy, the Virgin Mary appears at scenes depicting people falling from buildings, scaffoldings or trees. A cynic might be suspicious of her presence at the scene of every accident, but they’d need to overlook the key part of each story to make their case – all the fallers survive and go on to give praise.” These two children fell out of a tree on February 13th 1892. I checked, and it was a Saturday, not a Friday
Happy invoicing!
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