Far too much time on Teams today. Still, there'll be even more meetings tomorrow as it's Sprint Planning Day 
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- The Maintenance Race - Stewart Brand on the 1968 Golden Globe singlehanded circumnavigation of the globe yacht race and the lengths the competitors had to go to to keep their vessels in one piece: ”Its drama continues to echo half a century later because three of the nine competitors became legendary – the one who won, the one who didn’t bother to win, and the one who cheated. Their stories are usually told as a contest of wills and endurance, but at heart, it was a contest of maintenance styles.”
- Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight - ”In a rectangular room draped in camouflage netting, four Harris’ hawks took turns flying back and forth between grass-covered perches while scientists recorded their every biomechanical flutter. The researchers were partaking of the time-honored pursuit of watching birds fly — although in this experiment, their real interest was in watching them land.” You won't believe this one weird trick that lets them be better than anything we can make
- What Did the Ancient Whale See? - ”Reconstructing the visual proteins from whales’ early ancestors suggests they were deep-sea divers. The clever technique could help scientists understand the capabilities of other extinct species.”
- Locked-in Syndrome and the Misplaced Presumption of Misery - ”Despite near total paralysis, surveys suggest most LIS patients are happy. Researchers want that more widely understood.”
- Notable People - This map allows you to find the most "notable" person from any given place. There's more detail about how that is determined in the linked paper: ”We collect a massive amount of data from various editions of Wikipedia and Wikidata. Using deduplication techniques over these partially overlapping sources, we cross-verify each retrieved information… Our strategy results in a cross-verified database of 2.29 million individuals (an elite of 1/43,000 of human being having ever lived), including a third who are not present in the English edition of Wikipedia.”
- I Spent a Week in the Colombian Jungle Harvesting Cocaine - As you do: ”Like all Colombians, I grew up listening more to Pablo Escobar, the great drug lord, than to the founders of the Republic. I want to tell the true human face of that story.”
- The Man Who Attempted to Use Pleasure Conditioning to Turn a Gay Man Straight - HT to Doctor Strangelove for this one: ”Robert Heath claimed to have cured homosexuality by implanting electrodes into the pleasure centre of the brain. Robert Colvile reports on one of the great forgotten stories of neuroscience.”
- Gratispool - And HT to Paddy for this bit of photography history: ”Gratispool was arguably the first, and certainly the most famous, of the UK photographic film processing companies that dealt directly with the public via mail order. In various guises they operated from the early 1930s through to the early 1980s… Gratispool means literally ‘Free Film’ (roll films were called 'spools' at that time), but the free film that first made Gratispool famous, was a low cost paper based type, not celluloid based as sold by e.g. Ilford and Kodak.”
- Reverse-engineering a 1960s cordwood flip flop module with X-ray CT scans - ”How can you find out what's inside a sealed electronics module from the 1960s? In this blog post, I reverse-engineer an encapsulated flip flop module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. These modules are undocumented, so their internal circuitry is a mystery. Thanks to Lumafield, I obtained a three-dimensional CT scan of the module that clearly shows the wiring and components: transistors, diodes, resistors, and capacitors. From these images, I could determine the circuitry of this flip flop module.” Yes, it's Ken Shirriff
- The 2022 Audubon Photography Awards: Winners and Honorable Mentions - Another year, another bunch of cool bird photos: ”With their stunning looks and captivating behaviors, birds often enthrall us when they cross our path. Many people spend hours or years seeking them out. But just as often, we stumble upon unique moments in a stroke of luck. Sometimes all it takes is simply stopping to appreciate an everyday scene with fresh eyes.” These western grebes were photographed by Peter Shen.
Happy invoicing!
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