Can it really be Monday Links 666? Why yes, it can 
Happy invoicing!
- Alone at the Edge of the World - The story of Susie Goodall's voyage in the Golden Globe round-the-world yacht race: ”The 29-year-old British woman had spent three years readying for this voyage. It demanded more from her than she could have imagined. She loved the planning of it, rigging her boat for a journey that might mean not stepping on land for nearly a year. But she was unprepared for the attention it drew—for the fact that everyone wanted a piece of her story.”
- Black holes can’t trash info about what they swallow—and that’s a problem - ”Just three numbers—that’s all it takes to completely, unequivocally, 100 percent describe a black hole in general relativity… As long as the mass, charge, and spin are the same, the history is irrelevant. No information about the original material that created the black hole survives. Or does it?” Tricky questions about what happens to information in black holes.
- See the Facility That Tests whether Nuclear Weapons Work - ”The NIF possesses 192 laser beam lines, each more than 100 meters long. The lasers are aimed in pulses of 20 billionths of a second and 500 trillion watts—roughly 1,000 times U.S. power usage at any given instant—at minute samples of plutonium and other substances… NIF researchers say such experiments are necessary to understand how the U.S.'s more than 5,000 nuclear warheads, most of which were produced in the 1980s, will behave in the event of a thermonuclear exchange.” Better than just setting them off
- 404 Page Not Found - Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame) on the changing nature of online life: ”The internet is perhaps the most potent and active delivery system in history for the thesis ‘capitalism will obliterate everything you know and love’—online it happens in real time. Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to ‘be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever’ is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce.”
- Chernobyl’s Radiation Turned Its Local Frogs Black - ”It’s not often that you can watch evolution in action right in front of your eyes, but if you ever manage to visit the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone — which is a most unusual holiday plan — then you may notice its normally green frogs are now black. As black as charcoal briquettes. What happened? Evolution.”
- Cats Give the Laws of Physics a Biiiiig Stretch - ”They can fall from potentially infinite heights and survive. They can pivot off of nothing to land on their feet. Scientists still can’t fully explain why.” I wonder if a “Cats aren’t real” conspiracy theory would take off?
- This Plane Accidentally Flew Around the World - ”After Pearl Harbor, the crew of Pan Am flight 18602 was forced to do the impossible.” HT to ladymuck for this one; we’ve actually had the story of PanAm 18602 before, back in 2014, from a different site, but it’s a story that bears repeating and I think this one has some stuff the other one didn’t
- Pigeonpedia - Everything you need or want to know about pigeons: ”Pigeonpedia aims to answer all the questions that anyone has about pigeons, we want to become the go-to Wiki of Pigeon knowledge. Pigeonpedia was started in January 2020 by Dan, a pigeon aficionado who realized that there were very few dedicated pigeon sites on the internet. Our content is written by Dan, Denise and Cristina, three people who are passionate about pigeons.”
- The Tale Of Spiral Saga, The Lost PlayStation 1 Exclusive - Another lost game story: ”The PlayStation 1 had a lot of games announced that were sadly canceled before anyone got the chance to play them, but one that has always stuck in our minds was Spiral Saga… From 1996 to 1998, Spiral Saga appeared in several gaming publications, as one of the many exclusives that PlayStation players would eventually get their hands on. However, it never saw the light of day, with Sony quietly canceling the project in 1998 after it struggled to come together.”
- Maripedia - Marimekko - An extensive catalogue of historic designs from a Finnish clothing company: ”The print library Maripedia offers you an overview of Marimekko’s art of printmaking from the 1950s to the 2020s. Here you can identify and explore our vibrant prints, discover their designers, and enjoy the stories behind the patterns.” This design from 1969, called Mansikkavuoret (strawberry mountains), is by Maija Isola
Happy invoicing!
