I've been ill and busy today 
Happy invoicing!
- The rise of the Strangler - ”Deep in an archive kept secret for decades, the author found a stunning trove: social workers’ notes gathered over many years on the early life of Albert DeSalvo, the admitted killer of 11 women and one of Boston’s few truly iconic criminals.” Fascinating insights into the early development of a serial killer
- Why ‘De-Extinction’ Is Impossible (But Could Work Anyway) - ”Several projects are aiming to bring back mammoths and other species that have vanished from the planet. Whether that’s technically possible is beside the point.” My vote goes to the mammoths
- When Dangerous Weather Approaches The Spanish Translation Problem Looms - An interesting problem in issuing weather warnings: ”Much of the English meteorological terminology and jargon does not have a clear translation into Spanish… Carreño also said that connotations of risk words and sense of urgency can vary as a function of the variation of Spanish (for example, Mexican versus Puerto Rican).”
- The Story of the Nation State in Five Biscuits - Sharanya Deepak on the significance of biscuits in India: ”In the early 2000s, the Indian snack market was ablaze with new, flashy brands of beverages, biscuits and chips that came in bright packets with slapstick slogans and zany American-sounding names… These new snacks frightened my mother, but drove both my father and me to hide at the shops, where we sifted through the selection of compact packaged goods.”
- The LJ4D project - Loughborough Junction's Built History - More than you probably thought there was to know about this South London location: ”An ongoing project to model the development of Loughborough Junction from the mid-19th century up to the current day… The railway station has since lost its prominence, but the railway viaducts built during the 19th century continue to define the neighbourhood. The complex history of what has been built, dismantled and rebuilt since can be difficult to read from ground level, or from two dimensional historical maps and photos alone. This project attempts to put the pieces back together by reconstructing the past in three dimensions, and at multiple points in time.”
- Scientists Discover Method to Break Down Plastic in Days, Not Centuries - ”A group of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have created a modified enzyme that can break down plastics that would otherwise take centuries to degrade in a matter of days.”
- Occlusion Grotesque - Bjørn Karmann takes an innovative approach to typography: ”Occlusion Grotesque is an experimental typeface that is carved into the bark of a tree. As the tree grows, it deforms the letters and outputs new design variations, that are captured annually.”
- In the ’80s, she was a video game pioneer. Today, no one can find her - ”Her name is Ban Tran, and I’m guessing you have no idea who she is, or what she has to do with video games. It’s a shame, too, because Ban Tran made a pretty notable contribution to the gaming industry, and yet she’s been erased from history.” Well, guess what: Pioneer Rediscovered: The Woman who Brought Female Representation to Games: ”The big breakthrough came from member SoH, who had the idea of contacting the National Archives down in Texas to look through their bankruptcy records. Several of Apollo’s employees had to go through the court to get final royalty checks for their games, and as it turned out, Tran was one of them. Armed with this new information, we were able to finally reach out to her (now going by a married name, Van Mai), and she graciously agreed to an interview to tell her story.”
- Talking with the Moon: Inside Apollo's premodulation processor - Ken Shirriff with another bit of Apollo magic: ”The Apollo missions to the Moon required complex hardware to communicate between Earth and the spacecraft, sending radio signals over hundreds of thousands of miles. The premodulation processor was a key component of this system, combining voice, scientific data, TV, and telemetry for transmission to Earth.1 It was built from components that were welded together and tightly packed into a 14.5-pound box.2 In this blog post, I look inside the premodulation processor, examine its construction, and describe how each module worked.”
- Modern Publicity – Beautiful Images From the 1930s Commercial Art Annual - ”These images appeared in early issues of commercial art magazine Modern Publicity, published in London by The Studio Ltd (1930 – 1985)… The images in this post below were scanned from the 1930 and 1933 editions.”
Happy invoicing!
Comment