Yes, I know it's late again. This gig is up at the end of the month, so I'll have more time for important stuff then 
Happy invoicing!
- The Humiliating History of the TSA - The saga of the USA's post-9-11 security theatre agency: ”The family might not have known it, but they had run into one of air travel’s many gray areas. Without a formal death certificate, the passenger could not be considered legally dead. And US law obligates airlines to accommodate their ticketed and checked-in passengers… In short: she could still fly. But not before her body got checked for contraband, weapons, or explosives. And since the TSA’s body scanners can only be used on people who can stand up, the corpse would have to be manually patted down.”
- What the Gombe Chimpanzee War taught us about human nature - ”From 1974 to 1978, the chimps of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania were at war with each other, the first time conservationists saw chimps engage in calculated, cold-blooded killing.” You may remember I linked to an article about this conflict in 2018. Chimps have also been seen ganging up on gorillas, as reported in this paper from Nature: Lethal coalitionary attacks of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) on gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in the wild
- Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported - Capitalism is a crap way of delivering healthcare: ”Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference… Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. ‘As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,’ he says. ‘But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.’”
- Why Birds Changed Their Tune During the Pandemic - Because they didn’t have to compete with us: ”In San Francisco’s high-noise urban environment, the birds historically sang higher amplitude, higher frequency songs. But in April and May of 2020, suddenly they no longer had to shout over the traffic.”
- …and by islands I mean paragraphs - In this intriguing site by J. R. Carpenter, text appears in a map, and changes when you click on the islands: ”Flocks of books open and close, winging their way web-ward… These paragraphs are computer-generated. Their fluid compositions draw upon variable strings containing fragments of text harvested from a larger literary corpus.”
- The Original “Universal” Port - ”The Atari 2600’s joystick port had a history that survived for nearly two decades on a variety of systems, from the Sega Master System to the 3DO. Not that cross-compatibility is exactly perfect.” More than you ever thought there was to know about the once-ubiquitous connector
- The Case of the Autographed Corpse - ”The author of the Perry Mason novels rose to the defense of an Apache shaman who was falsely convicted of killing his wife.” “Wrongly”, surely, not “falsely”. Anyway, Erle Stanley Gardner stepped up
- How Giant Isopods Got Supersized - ”Scientists are diving into the genome of an overgrown crustacean to understand how some deep-sea creatures got so big.” Horrid-looking things, but scientifically interesting it seems
- BBC Micro Revs source code - After Elite and Aviator, Mark Moxon continues his work documenting Acornsoft’s greatest hits: ”This site contains source code for Revs, Geoff Crammond's epic Formula 3 racing simulator for the BBC Micro, with every single line documented and (for the most part) explained… Note that the code on this site is not Geoff Crammond's original source code, as that hasn't been released. Instead, it is a fully buildable source that's been lovingly reconstructed from a disassembly of the original game binaries, and which produces exactly identical game files. All the variable and routine names are my own invention, but the code itself matches the original source.”
- Peanuts flongs 1970s - ”A collection of four-color separations (some in complete sets) of Peanuts Sunday comics from about 1973 to 1977 in flong form: a heavy paper mold used by syndicates to send out strips to newspapers.” An intriguing, long-defunct technology; this was the “key” (black, the K in CMYK) plate for 28 March 1976. For more details on flongs, Glenn Fleishmann (the curator of this collection) has written an article explaining how they revolutionised the newspaper industry: Flong time, no see
Happy invoicing!
