Some stuff to pass the time until the liar calls a general election out of spite, so you'd better read quickly 
Happy invoicing!
- “I’m Still Alive but Sh*t Is Getting Wild”: Inside the Siege of the Amarula - ”When vast gas reserves were discovered off the idyllic coast of northern Mozambique, a crew of roughnecks flew in from around the world to make their fortunes. But in March 2021, Islamist rebels attacked, and the foreigners and thousands of Mozambicans were abandoned. Two hundred holed up at the Amarula Lodge, where the expats faced a choice: save themselves, or risk it all to save everyone.”
- How the Brain ‘Constructs’ the Outside World - ”Neural activity probes your physical surroundings to select just the information needed to survive and flourish.” György Buzsáki on what we think we know about what we call “reality”.
- Why Did the U.S. Government Amass More Than a Billion Pounds of Cheese? - ”The year was 1981, and President Ronald Reagan had a cheese problem. Specifically, the federal government had 560 million pounds of cheese, most of it stored in vast subterranean storage facilities.” Diana Hubbell on the saga of the USA’s cheese stockpile.
- Nobel Endeavours - ”Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’ As people who’ve never professed to understand quantum mechanics, The Fence find this statement quite presumptuous, but decided we’d ask some of the world’s biggest boffins how much they do or don’t know about their jobs, life and everything else besides.”
- Spectres of the Spectrum - ”Spectres of the Spectrum is a feature-length 16mm film utilizing old 'kinescopes' (filmed records of early TV broadcasts before the advent of videotape, mostly from the late Fifties' educational show called 'Science in Action') to create an eerie, haunted ‘media-archaeology’ zone for a sci-fi time-travel tale, wherein live-action actors search for a hidden electromagnetic secret to save the planet from a futuristic war-machine, inspired by HAARP the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program.” In other words, a weird sci-fi film, by Craig Baldwin
- The Fugitive Next Door - ”Tim Brown seemed like a typical Florida retiree—he loved doting on his wife, fishing with friends, and flying his plane. But his life was built on a secret.” In case “Florida” isn’t enough of a clue, the secret involves cocaine
- Installing a payphone in my house - ”I recently moved into a new place and finally got to ditch Comcast for Sonic, which previously wasn’t in my coverage area. This has a few benefits… Last but not least, they include a landline with your service. At first I ignored it, but it gnawed at me. A telephone jack that worked and nothing to plug into it.” Bertrand Fan finds that payphones are pretty cheap now
- Calling CardPass - ”Whoever was behind the disappearance of wealthy Norwegian Anne-Elisabeth Hagen from the township of Lørenskog bought this copy of a passport… But from whom? A mysterious cover name on the darknet stands out: CardPass.” Norwegian business news site E24 investigates a possible link between a stolen passport and a mysterious disappearance.
- Xerox Parc’s Engineers on How They Invented the Future—and How Xerox Lost It - ”In late 1969, C. Peter McColough, chairman of Xerox Corp., told the New York Society of Security Analysts that Xerox was determined to develop “the architecture of information” to solve the problems that had been created by the “knowledge explosion.” Legend has it that McColough then turned to Jack E. Goldman, senior vice president of research and development, and said, “All right, go start a lab that will find out what I just meant.“” This retrospective of the innovative Palo Alto Research Center was originally published in print in October 1985.
- The Art of Penguin Science Fiction - James Pardy presents an excellent and detailed journey through the history of Penguin’s sci-fi book cover designs: ” In the 1950s the covers changed to vertical bands and illustrated covers were introduced, followed by a radically new cover design, the Marber grid, in the early 1960s. Then came the launch of a science fiction series featuring abstract and surrealist cover art by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, René Magritte and others… In the 1970s Penguin sf turned to covers inspired by Op Art and Pop Art, while the Penguin Modern Classics linked sf with paintings by Léger, Malevich and Edward Hopper. But to put these developments in perspective it is best to begin in the 1930s, for these early covers, now celebrated on a stamp, are themselves regarded as pocket-sized artworks.” I've got this 1960 edition of The Black Cloud
Happy invoicing!
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