I think I managed to get the Roman numerals right this time 
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- Waiting for Brando - A bizarre tale from cinematic history, which began when 20-year-old Edward Jay Epstein, while on suspension from Cornell University, was trying to impress a girl: ”I read a story in the New York Times reporting that Zervos Pictures in Athens and Mosfilms in Moscow had tentatively agreed to make a Russian-Greek coproduction of the Iliad. I was taken by an absolutely insane idea: if I produced the Iliad, I could cast Susan as Helen. Seizing the opportunity, I dashed off a telegram to Zervos Pictures in Athens: ‘IF YOU ARE NOT IRREVOCABLY COMMITTED TO THE RUSSIANS, WOULD YOU CONSIDER DOING INSTEAD AN AMERICAN COPRODUCTION WITH MARLON BRANDO AS ACHILLES, JAMES MASON AS AGAMEMNON, RICHARD BOONE AS ODYSSEUS AND SUSAN BROCKMAN AS HELEN OF TROY.’”
- Bees learn to dance and to solve puzzles from their peers - ”Two recent papers offer evidence of "social learning" and possible culture in bees.” Once they’ve worked out it’s us doing the pesticides, we’re done for
- The Lion, the Land Bridge, and the New World - ”Lions prowled North America for tens of thousands of years before going extinct. Today, no lions lounge in southern Alberta canola fields or chase prey through Yukon grasslands—so what happened?” Not only people, for a change.
- The five nominees for the International Mollusc of the Year 2023 - ”The winning mollusc is selected by a public vote, and the ‘prize’ is complete genome sequencing of the species by LOEWE TBG.” They should do that to Oscar winners
- The Great Seal Bug. Part 1: history, Part 2: theory of operation, Part 3: Building a working copy of The Thing, Demo of a working replica of the Great Seal Bug on the 23cm band - ”On 4 August 1945, at the end of WW II, the Pioneer scouts (children from the Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union) gave Averell Harriman, the USA ambassador, a beautiful wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. This was a ‘gesture of friendship’ to USA, USSR’s war ally… According to different accounts, the US learned around 1951-1952 that a listening device has been planted at the ambassador’s residence.” HT to Doctor Strangelove for this excellent series of posts by Jacek Lipkowski, call sign SQ5BPF, about recreating the famous Russian bug. I first learned about this remarkable piece of technology from Peter Wright’s account of it in Spycatcher. Bonus: another reconstruction at the behest of the BBC
- Ukraine, One Year at War: An interactive timeline of the conflict - ”See how events unfolded through maps and Grid’s in-depth reporting and analysis.” Excellent tool for exploring the timeline of the war.
- Love at First Line - Want to read a book but don’t know what? This site presents the first lines of books so you can find one that intrigues you! ”Each sentence below is the first sentence of a novel. Click on a sentence to add it to your bag in the top right!”
- Jennifer Mills News - Jennifer Mills, 38, has been recording her life in a weekly newspaper since 2002. Highlights include the problems presented by not having laundry facilities in her Brooklyn apartment: ”Mills often will hold back special items that she doesn't want to die with the intention that she will wash them one day in her bathtub like a lady by a river in the Bible… ‘Once I washed a pair of jeans and my hair dryer exploded because I tried to dry the jeans by blowing the hair dryer in one of the legs and sealing it,’ said Mills, who created a fire hazard and will never do it again.”
- Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spaceflight navigation computer - Ken Shirriff continues his exploration of the Russian electro-mechanical computer: ”Opening up the Globus reveals that it is packed with complicated gears and mechanisms. It's amazing that this mechanical technology was used from the 1960s into the 21st century. But what are all those gears doing? How can orbital functions be implemented with gears? To answer these questions, I reverse-engineered the Globus and traced out its system of gears.”
- Wallpaper Sample Book, Bauhaus - Not much you can add to that description
Happy invoicing!
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