Sorry it's late again, but even reading the Internet is tiring in this heat
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- A Plane of Monkeys, a Pandemic, and a Botched Deal: Inside the Science Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of - ”Experts say there’s a dire shortage of primates for biomedical research—and it’s putting human lives at risk.” Jackie Flynn Mogensen investigates the murky business of supplying primates to labs.
- This Fungus Has More Than 17,000 Sexes - ”Advances in sequencing technologies have finally allowed researchers to zero in on the genetic diversity underlying the incredible mating system of shelf fungi.” Don't tell the Tories, they'll burst a blood vessel trying to work out which ones to call "mother"
- Did the Vikings Actually Torture Victims With the Brutal ‘Blood Eagle’? - ”In popular lore, few images are as synonymous with Viking brutality as the “blood eagle,” a practice that allegedly found torturers separating the victim’s ribs from their spine, pulling their bones and skin outward to form a set of “wings,” and removing their lungs from their chest cavity.” But would it work?
- Atari is 50! How about a Star Wars Easter Egg? - ”A while back, I wrote about the development of Atari’s Star Wars arcade cabinet… Since writing that piece, I’ve had the good fortune to interview Mike Halley and had further discussions with Jed Margolin about the development of the game. Of all the things we discussed, it was one small thing that I found most interesting, and that was information about a relatively unknown (I think!) Easter Egg in the game.” Quite a cool one, given that you risk blowing up your arcade machine's vector monitor if you try to find it
- Rapped Knuckles All Round - Tracking down a continuity error in Yes, Minister: ”Someone doing the checking noticed a slight mistake in one of Nigel’s long speeches… What no one had noticed was that since Nigel recorded the speech the first time there had been intervening scenes with costume changes, and Nigel was wearing the wrong tie.”
- Absurd Trolley Problems - The usual question of whether you throw the switch to divert the trolley, but in increasingly ridiculous situations
- The Interrobang Is 60?! - ”Yes, dear reader: It’s been six decades since adman Martin K. Speckter announced to the world that what we needed was a single piece of punctuation to do the job of both a question mark and an exclamation point. It was the spring of ’62 when he proposed what came to be known as the interrobang.” All you need to know about this underused bit of punctuation. Or is it‽
- ‘No Aliens, No Spaceships, No Invasion of Earth’ An oral history of Contact, the sci-fi movie that defied Hollywood norms and made it big anyway. - ”Ahead of Contact’s 25th anniversary, we spoke to nearly two dozen people involved in its making, including Zemeckis, Foster, McConaughey, Druyan, Sasha Sagan, and veteran producer Lynda Obst. They disagreed on several aspects of Contact’s development saga, but settled on some consensus: Contact was a lightning-in-a-bottle project, the kind of thing big movie studios barely made before and would probably never make again — intellectually challenging, emotionally messy, heavy with metaphor, wherein nobody shoots an alien in the face in front of an American flag.”
- Reverse-engineering the Apollo spacecraft's FM radio - Ken Shirriff gets his hands on yet more Apollo circuitry: ”How did NASA communicate with the Apollo astronauts, hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth? The premodulation processor1 (below) was the heart of the communication system onboard the Apollo spacecraft. Its multiple functions included an FM radio for communication to the astronauts, implemented by the Voice Detector, the module second from the top. In this blog post, I reverse-engineer the circuitry for that module and explain how it worked.”
- $8,879,000 Worth of the World's Most Complicated and Unusual Mechanical Watches - ”If money is no object but you still struggle to be on time, there's an obscenely over-engineered watch out there for you.” One for you watch lovers. This Jacob & Co. Astronomia Tourbillon is only $548,000
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