Soon be autumn, though the weather today seems to think it's already here. Anyway, no need to go outside when there's all this good stuff to read 
Happy invoicing!
- The Wreck - ”A nightmare at sea turned into one of the greatest rescues in maritime history. When a rookie treasure hunter went looking for the lost ship, he found a different kind of ruin.” The story of the wreck of the Connaught in 1860 and its rediscovery in 2014.
- The Sea Eagles That Returned to Mull - ”Almost 50 years ago, conservationists reintroduced white-tailed eagles to Scotland. It’s gone well. Some say too well.” Dubious farmers suspect the eagles enjoy lamb as much as fish…
- Earth's First Nuclear Reactor Is 1.7 Billion Years Old And Was Made Naturally - ”If you were hunting for alien intelligence, looking for a surefire signature from across the Universe of their activity, you'd have a few options… you might look for a technological achievement, like the creation of particles like antineutrinos in a nuclear reactor. After all, that's how we first detected neutrinos (or antineutrinos) on Earth. But if we took that last option, we might fool ourselves.” HT to DoctorStrangelove for this one, and he threw in a bonus link too: all you need to know about Xenon-135 Reactor Poisoning
- Candy Crush's Puzzling Mathematics - ”This simple game has deceptively difficult computational problems behind it, which might be why it’s so addictive.” A more detailed explanation of the maths can be found in the associated paper: Candy Crush is NP-hard
- Mistranslation Of Newton’s First Law Discovered After Nearly 300 Years - HT to vetran for this one: ”For hundreds of years, we have been told what Newton’s First Law of Motion supposedly says, but recently a paper published in Philosophy of Science (preprint) by [Daniel Hoek] argues that it is based on a mistranslation of the original Latin text.”
- The Real Technology Behind 2001’s HAL - The National Air and Space Museum on Kubrick's association with IBM: ”2001 stands out among other science fiction films of its day, in part because Kubrick consulted experts in the computer and space fields to portray a realistic and scientifically-grounded expectation of where computing and space exploration would be in 2001… What kinds of advice did Kubrick get?”
- A Brief History of the Mom & Pop Business of Public Execution - ”In Paris, when his father died in 1644, Louis Desmorest inherited his family’s execution business at the age of 10. His mother had been part of an established execution family that had been in business for the past 100 years.” They weren't the only families to act as executioners over many generations. (The article doesn't mention Albert Pierrepoint, whose father and uncle had both also occupied the role.)
- Cooking a Microwave Feast, 1980s-Style - ”Recently, my friend Rachel found a pile of 1980s cookbooks on a curb and gave them to me as a housewarming present. The one that caught my eye was The JCPenney Microwave Cookbook… I decided that I would host a dinner party consisting of only recipes from this book.” Some surprising culinary successes here
- Comics in comics - Popular comedians often used to have tie-in strips in children's comics: ”Whilst the style of these strips were of the standard slapstick knockabout fare familiar to readers of The Beano, they contain an extraordinarily rich history of how comedians were perceived, and also elements of their stage and variety personae that have often been lost… It is testimony to the fame of Tony Hancock that he made it on to the front cover of Film Fun in 1960 without actually being a film star.”
- Our Favorite Female Bird Shots From the 2023 Audubon Photography Awards - ”From the subtle beauty of a Spruce Grouse hen to the bold russet patches on a Red-necked Phalarope, the female birds featured in this gallery captured the eyes and imaginations of photographers from across North America… The female bird category challenges photographers to focus their cameras and attention on the sex that is too often ignored.” This wood duck and duckling were photographed in Santee, California by Tammy Kokjohn
Happy invoicing!
