Some more stuff to pass the time until the next Bank Holiday, which is ages away 
Happy invoicing!
- The Romance Scammer on My Sofa - Carlos Barragán tracks down the Nigerian scammer who duped his mother: ”Bro, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Being a Yahoo boy is very stressful… Do you find it easy to make someone fall in love with you? The hustle is the same as real life, with just one difference: You have to pretend to be another person.”
- What I Learned on a Titanic Sub Expedition - ”Last summer, for a CBS News Sunday Morning story, I joined OceanGate for a dive on its Titan submersible. I never saw the Titanic. We were only 37 feet below the waves when mission control aborted our dive… Now, I’m sick to my stomach. Now, I feel like I won at Russian roulette. Three dives later, the Titan imploded and killed the five people onboard.” David Pogue reflects on his experiences in light of the tragedy.
- The Nanohertz Gravitational-Wave Detection Explained - ”Jorge Cham, aka PHD Comics, illustrates how researchers have turned our Galaxy into a giant antenna for catching gravitational waves, spotting for the first time a background hum of such waves.” Last week's announcement explained in comic form
- Luxury Train Cars Used To Ride On Paper Wheels - HT to vetran for this surprising aspect of railway history: ”Early on, railways primarily used wheels made of wood or iron. The former were cheap and relatively easy to manufacture, while the latter had far superior wear qualities. It may surprise you to learn, however, that some railways once used wheels made out of paper.”
- The 1,500 drone dragon that danced in the Shenzhen sky - ”Around 1,500 drones lit up the night sky over the Chinese city of Shenzhen on 22 June with imagery of a flying dragon to mark the start of the country’s Dragon Boat Festival.” Impressive stuff
- Mars Rock Samples Collected by the Perseverance Rover - All the rocks: ”NASA's Mars Perseverance rover is building a unique rock collection, which also includes samples of Mars atmosphere and loose surface material. These samples record the history of the Jezero Crater landing site, and may even preserve signs of ancient life. Learn more about these precious samples, which Mars Sample Return could deliver to Earth for detailed study in the future.”
- Why you’re hardwired to trust confident voices. Even when they’re wrong - This is why the Eton boys keep getting away with their tulip: ”Human evolution has led to us naturally believe statements delivered in a more assured manner.”
- The Garden Secret, Lewisham - A bizarre crime from the 1950s: ”It was a spring Sunday morning in 1957 and Lewisham housewife, Agnes Hutchinson, was hanging out the washing in her back garden when she happened upon a little note… ‘I am Miss M Jordan from Elmer’s End, Beckenham. Will you please call the police as I am in a large shed in a room under the ground. He is keeping me prisoner.’”
- The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor - Ken Shirriff on an unusual 1990s microprocessor: ”It had a shot at being Intel's flagship processor until x86 overshadowed it. Later, it was the world's best-selling RISC processor. One variant was a 33-bit processor with a decidedly non-RISC object-oriented instruction set; it became a military standard and was used in the F-22 fighter plane. Another version powered Intel's short-lived Unix servers. In this blog post, I'll take a look at the history of the i960, explain its different variants, and examine silicon dies.”
- Inkies: The men and women working the world's biggest printing press - Kenny Farquharson: ”I jumped at the chance to photograph The Times being printed at the giant Newsprinters plant at Eurocentral on the M8… Eurocentral is home to two XXL Manroland Colourman presses, which combined make the largest newspaper printing press in the world. At full capacity it can print 172,000 full-colour colour newspapers an hour.”
Happy invoicing!
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