Still no Bank Holiday! I really don't know how much longer we can be expected to put up with this 
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- Held Together - ”A filmmaker was producing a documentary series on the Iran hostage crisis. Then her father went missing overseas.” Lucy Sexton and Joe Sexton tell two sides of the story of Joe's kidnap in Libya.
- Seals uncover new ocean depths in East Antarctica - ”New ocean depths and seascapes beneath the East Antarctic continental shelf have been revealed in the latest study tracking deep-diving seals.” The full paper has more details of how the seals are helping out.
- A Critical Problem - Getting private industry involved isn't always a good idea: ”The metal rods in the top photo are plutonium. Rods can roll. These rods could roll closer to each other and perhaps produce the kind of runaway neutron reaction that killed Slotin and Daghlian. Putting a hand in to separate them could make the reaction worse because the water in a human body reflects the neutrons… A technician ignored glovebox limits and arranged the plutonium to take that photo for management. A Los Alamos manager is also quoted in the articles as saying that the criticality safety group was an unnecessary expense.”
- “Utsurobune”: A UFO Legend from Nineteenth-Century Japan - ”A mysterious event in Japan at the beginning of the nineteenth century shows surprising similarities with stories of UFOs.” Although Japanese folklore abounds in tales of mysterious visitations by outsiders, the 1803 account is surprisingly detailed
- These shapes roll in peculiar ways thanks to new mathematics - ”Thanks to a complex mathematical algorithm, these plastic shapes follow a very specific route as they roll. In fact, researchers have shown that a shape can be designed to follow almost any path you can think of. What started out as just an interesting challenge for the researchers could have unexpected applications in quantum physics.” Full paper: Solid-body trajectoids shaped to roll along desired pathways
- Tales from the Trenches of Tech Support Hell - Janel Comeau on the perils of dealing with the public and their computer woes: ”I’d spent enough time manning the tills at a now-defunct Canadian department store to discover that customers weren’t always rational people. The first time I was screamed at and personally blamed for the price of milk, I learned to be wary of the general public’s critical thinking skills… A fancy laptop costs $1000, and is handcrafted by wizards and black magic. Tensions are bound to run high.”
- An Oriental PsyOps Mystery — the story of Radio Spark - ”A decision was therefore made to install on Taiwan a pair of clandestine radio transmitters which would broadcast propaganda… If the Chinese people accepted the radio broadcasts as genuine, the CIA reasoned, then they might be convinced that the countermovement to the Cultural Revolution was gaining strength.” Unfortunately, the part of the CIA that was broadcasting deceptive propaganda didn't tell the part of the CIA that gathered intelligence from radio broadcasts what they were doing…
- Postcode Area Factsmash - All kinds of information about postcode areas. You may find this useful, or you may not. For example: ”WC either has 2 or 14 [districts], depending on whether you count WC1A, WC1B, WC1E, WC1H, WC1N, WC1R, WC1V, WC1X, WC2A, WC2B, WC2E, WC2H, WC2N and WC2R as separate districts.”
- Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer - A history lesson from Ken Shirriff: ”The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it is little-endian, has a parity flag, and uses explicit I/O instructions instead of just memory-mapped I/O. It has four 16-bit registers that can be split into 8-bit registers, but only one that can be used for memory indexing. Surprisingly, the reason for these characteristics and more is compatibility with a computer dating back before the creation of the microprocessor: the Datapoint 2200, a minicomputer with a processor built out of TTL chips.”
- Frank Hurley on the Western Front - Photographs from a hundred and six years ago this month: ”Before arriving on the Western Front in August 1917 to document the Third Battle of Ypres, Hurley had been no stranger to photographing under risky conditions. Less than one year earlier, he had returned to civilization after two years stranded on the pack ice of Antarctica with Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance… Hurley went straight to work upon his arrival at the front lines south and east of the ruined West Flanders city of Ypres, risking life and limb in his efforts to document the conflict.” This selection of photos incorporates extracts from Hurley's diary. This photo is taken from inside the ruins of Ypres cathedral, looking out at a makeshift graveyard for fallen troops.
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