I'm supposed to be moving hundreds of books over to my new flat, but I suppose I'd better get this lot posted first 
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- 172 Runners Started This Ultramarathon. 21 of Them Never Came Back. - ”As temperatures dropped toward freezing and rain pelted the trail, runners in China's Yellow River Stone Forest 100K knew they were in danger.” A salutary reminder of the perils of exercising
- Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence - Particle physics may have to stop soon because it relies on a program from the 1980s: ”Developed by the Dutch particle physicist Jos Vermaseren, FORM is a key part of the infrastructure of particle physics, necessary for the hardest calculations. However, as with surprisingly many essential pieces of digital infrastructure, FORM’s maintenance rests largely on one person: Vermaseren himself. And at 73, Vermaseren has begun to step back from FORM development.”
- In Alaska, a Mystery Over Disappearing Whales - ”Belugas pass cultural knowledge across generations. Their survival may depend on how they collectively adapt.”
- The Romano-British Writing Tablets of Vindolanda - Daily life in Roman England: ”The excavation and decipherment of almost 900 more thin wooden tablets, written in ink, has yielded a vast amount of such information in the form of shopping lists, letters to families and military colleagues, accounts, military reports and so on… Further discoveries of comparable material from earlier decades at other Roman sites, notably Carlisle and London, has resulted in an accumulation of over 1,200 tablets from Britannia, many of them substantial, and makes the province the richest new source of such everyday records in Latin in the Roman Empire.”
- GeoPl@ntNe - Find out what your local plants are: ”Select a rectangular area on the map (as small as you like) and the service returns a list of plant species that can be found there. For each species, the system also returns the number of known occurrences of the species in the selected area (if any) by querying the GBIF portal API.”
- New York’s Grand Dame of Dog Poisoning - ”Juliet Tuttle may have been the most prolific murderer of pets in American history. How did she get away with it?” She doesn’t seem very nice
- Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields - In the USA only, but still interesting if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in: ”As a pilot, a particular interest of mine has always been the abandoned airfields that dot the landscape of much of this country. Both for their potential safety value to a pilot in an emergency, and also for their sometimes fascinating history, this particular topic has always held my curiosity.”
- The Chairs of Pebble Mill at One - Expanded! - Remember the BBC Birmingham live lunchtime magazine show? Here’s an aspect of it you probably hadn’t thought about before: ”Because no one asked for it, here’s some chair spotting from the BBC studios in Birmingham. It may have a slight Doctor Who flavour to it.”
- Teletext Elite - ”Teletext Elite is the full and unabridged disc version of BBC Micro Elite, converted to run in the BBC Micro's teletext screen mode (so it looks like Ceefax and Oracle). For those of us of a certain age, this is peak 1980s nostalgia.” Mark Moxon does the unthinkable: implementing Bresenham’s line drawing algorithm in Mode 7
If you don’t want to install a BBC Micro emulator (or get your Beeb out of the loft and replace that capacitor that always blows due to age), you can play it in your browser. - Goalposts - Artist Neville Gabie documents goalposts around the world: ”Originally motivated by the sculptural qualities of these goalposts and the spaces where the game is played, the project has developed into an objective archive of diverse cultural landscapes with a common obsession, football. What began as a personal interest whilst working in South Africa in 1996, the project and archive now includes over 1000 photographs from over forty countries and every continent.” These ones in Liverpool are about five minutes’ walk from the football pitches of the Wavertree Sports Park, suggesting the local kids like football but don’t like having to walk any distance for it
Happy invoicing!
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