Another week without a Bank Holiday Monday! How long do we have to suffer this indignity 
Happy invoicing!
- America’s First Plane Bomber, and His Intended Victim - ”After buying the requisite tools and equipment, Jack sat down in the basement of his family home and got to work. He assembled twenty-five sticks of dynamite, a timing device, an Eveready six-volt “Hot Shot” battery and two dynamite caps into a compact time bomb… After saying goodbye to Daisie at the gate, Jack and Gloria stopped for a snack at the airport coffee shop—but not before Jack bought an insurance policy on Daisie’s life .” Not a nice man
- The Number 15 Describes the Secret Limit of an Infinite Grid - ”The ‘packing coloring’ problem asks how many numbers are needed to fill an infinite grid so that identical numbers never get too close to one another. A new computer-assisted proof finds a surprisingly straightforward answer.” Another mathematical proof that came from somebody becoming interested in a random puzzle
- How intrepid Victorian surveyors mapped the length and breadth of Britain - ”Today’s country walkers owe much to the theodolite-lugging cartographers of the early Ordnance Survey.” Cool history of the noble OS map
- A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut - ”In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century.” Now coming to Unicode
- Adrien de Gerlache - Belgica Belgian Antarctic Expedition 1897 - 1899 - HT to Uncle Albert for this interesting account of an Antarctic expedition I wasn’t familiar with: ”The voyage of the Belgica under the command of Adrien de Gerlache set out from Antwerp, Belgium at the end of August 1897. It is one of the most fascinating of the early Antarctic expeditions and also probably the least comfortable one to have taken part in for all concerned.”
- The Illuminati: 13 questions about the clandestine secret society answered - ”Who were the Illuminati, and do they really control the world? Here's what we know about one of history's most alluring secret societies, including how you became a member...” Honestly, they’ll let anybody in nowadays
- Space Elevator - Another fun thingy from Neal: ride the space elevator to find out what’s up in the atmosphere and beyond
- Random Airport - No idea who this is by, but it does what it says: shows you airports at random.
- The Gostak - Aaron A. Read on a piece of interactive fiction from 2001 that used an invented language yet was still somehow playable: ”Carl Muckenhoupt had wondered for years before he wrote The Gostak whether you could create a game about ‘learning to function in a world you have no basis for imagining.’… Muckenhoupt noted that this structural information is exactly what you need to operate language in an interactive fiction. You don’t have to understand what distimming actually does to realize a command like DISTIM DOSH should be linguistically valid, or to type it at a prompt to see what happens.”
- Strandbeest - ”Theo Jansen is engaged in creating new forms of life: the so called strandbeests. Skeletons made from yellow plastic tube (Dutch electricity pipe) are able to walk and get their energy from the wind. They have evolved since their inception in 1990 and have been divided into 12 periods of evolution.” His latest creations will be striding across the beaches of The Netherlands this summer. This one is the Ader, which can fly
Happy invoicing!
Comment