Bit late today; there was a surprising amount to catch up on this morning after I'd taken a couple of days off at the end of last week for my Mum's funeral 
Happy invoicing!
- Swamp Boy - ”Judy noticed that Michael was unusually quiet. She glanced over at her adorable fourteen-year-old. He was tall and gangly, with a mop of brown hair that flopped over one eye… When they got home, she called her husband, Scott, into the living room. They sat on the sofa. Michael took a deep breath and began: ‘I think I'm the evil, damned son of the devil.’” It took two years for the doctors were able to work out what was turning an ordinary boy into a deranged monster
- It’s Hurricane Showdown Season in the Atlantic - ”A hot and bothered Atlantic Ocean is butting up against a burgeoning El Niño in the Pacific. If the conditions are right, could El Niño stop hurricanes before they form?” An interesting look at the complex things happening to weather conditions out there.
- Dude, what are those humongous plasma waves in Jupiter’s atmosphere? - ”Plasma collisions in the outer edges of Jupiter's magnetosphere produce big waves.” Probably aliens
- The World Is Not Prepared for Another Cholera Wave - ”Sanitation and vaccination can prevent cholera. But recent outbreaks highlight obstacles to stopping the disease.” Maybe this is the wrong time for our water companies to be discharging raw sewage all over the place?
- The myth of mirrored twins - ”What do the lives of twins tell us about heritability, selfhood and the age-old debate between nature and nurture?” Turns out twins might be a bit more complicated than some studies suggest.
- World's First Steam-Driven Airplane - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this story from a 1933 edition of Popular Science Monthly: ”Over the Oakland, Calif., Airport, a few days ago, a silent plane slanted across the sky trailing a thin ribbon of white vapour. Spectators heard the pilot shout a greeting from the air… They had seen, for the first time in history, a man fly on wings powered by steam!” And now you can too, as the good Doctor also found a film of the occasion
- The Forgotten Housewife who Invented your Dishwasher - ”As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Case in point: there’s a certain 19th century American housewife and single mother we should thank for giving us the mechanical dishwasher. You’ve probably never heard of her but Mrs. Cochrane forever changed the landscape of household chores and revolutionised the kitchen.”
- Twitter’s Future Is a Return to Elon Musk’s Past - He’s been trying to convince people that “X” is a cool name for a company for donkey’s years, and it hasn’t worked on the previous occasions either: ”The rise and fall of X’s previous incarnation—and his first attempt to dominate fintech—has fallen out of his narrative. Though its history may read like an episode of Succession, it has defined Musk’s approach to company control and ownership ever since.”
- A close look at the 8086 processor's bus hold circuitry - More 8086 insights from Ken Shirriff: ”One of the lesser-known features of the 8086 is the ‘hold’ functionality, which allows an external device to temporarily take control of the system's bus. This feature was most important for supporting the 8087 math coprocessor chip, which was an option on the IBM PC; the 8087 used the bus hold so it could interact with the system without conflicting with the 8086 processor. This blog post explains in detail how the bus hold feature is implemented in the processor's logic.”
- Nostalgic Showa ice cream - ”A collection of Showa ice cream that appeared from the 1950s to the 1960s.” From the archives of the Japanese Ice Cream Association. This 1960s “hat ice” is from Morinaga & Co., Ltd.
Happy invoicing!
Comment