We've probably got an hour or two before the next scandal engulfs the government, so here's some stuff to help pass the time more fruitfully 
Happy invoicing!
- The Violin Doctor - ”He’s trusted to repair some of the world’s most fabled — and expensive — instruments. How does John Becker manage to unlock the sound of a Stradivarius?” Interesting profile of a master luthier.
- How Quantum Physicists ‘Flipped Time’ (and How They Didn’t) - They're at it again: ”Two teams have made photons act as if time were simultaneously flowing in two directions. The experiments demonstrate a way to potentially boost the performance of quantum devices.”
- Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? - ”An unexpected ancient manufacturing strategy may hold the key to designing concrete that lasts for millennia.” Shame they didn't find this out before building the M6 through Birmingham
- Archaeologists Discover 1.2 Million-Year-Old 'Workshop' in Mind-Blowing Find - ”Scientists have discovered a trove of nearly 600 obsidian hand-axes that were crafted more than 1.2 million years ago in Ethiopia by an unknown group of hominins… The discovery pushes the timeline of obsidian tool use back by an astonishing 500,000 years.”
- The dark side of the hut, 50 years later - ”A little story for you, below, dating from nearly fifty years ago, when I was living in a little mud hut in the village of Fanaye Dieri, Senegal, on the edge of the Sahara desert.” Novelist John Sundman recalls an unexpected happening in a remote location.
- The Sauce That Survived Italy’s War on Pasta - A reminder that the Italian Futurists weren't just fascists but also idiots: ”In 1932, Italian culinary magazine La Cucina Italiana awarded their Best Pasta Sauce prize to one chef’s Sugo Marinetti, or Marinetti sauce. Said sauce stood out not only for its unique combination of chopped pistachios and artichokes sauteed in butter, but also for its ironic title: the firebrand poet Filoppo Marinetti, for whom the pasta sauce was named, was at that very moment fighting to banish pasta from Italy.”
- Wonders of Street View - Neal Argawal, previously responsible for such things as Absurd Trolley Problems and Asteroid Launcher, presents a fun little toy showing the many interesting things to be seen in Google's views of the world
- mozilla.org's 25th anniversary - Former denizen of Netscape and Mozilla Jamie Zawinski with the story of how they open sourced the browser that ended up becoming Firefox, with links to such pertinent documents and repositories as have survived bitrot: ”Lacking any coherent information or direction from management (spoiler alert, there was no plan! none!) a handful of us in the trenches had some impromptu meetings… So then I registered the domain mozilla.org. According to WHOIS, the registration went live on January 23rd at 9pm.”
- Reverse-engineering the Intel 8086 processor's HALT circuits - Ken Shirriff examines the hardware supporting possibly the only instruction I never used in all my years writing 8086 assembly language: ”One unusual instruction in this processor is HLT, which stops the processor and puts it in a halt state. In this blog post, I explain in detail how the halt circuitry is implemented and how it interacts with the 8086's architecture.”
- Closer to Johannes Vermeer - Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has created a beautiful online exhibition of the Dutch artist's work, narrated by Stephen Fry. This is Mistress and Maid, c.1666-67.
Happy invoicing!
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