I managed to give myself food poisoning last night, but we're in the final week of the project with a month's work left to do. Ah well, recuperation is for permies 
Happy invoicing!
- Confessions of a Journalist Turned Weed Smuggler - After experiences such as being embedded with the US Marines in Iraq, John Koopman didn't fancy taking dead end jobs: ”This is something they don’t tell you about criminal activity. When you’re facing economic hardship, you’re also usually facing mind-numbing, soul-destroying drudgery at the jobs that are available to you. It’s not just that they don’t pay you enough. They also make you feel dead. A lot of people turn to illegal or otherwise questionable activity simply because they want to feel alive.”
- Ancient Roman “wow glass” has photonic crystal patina forged over centuries - ”Roman glass shards are noteworthy for their iridescent hues of blue, green, and orange—the result of the corrosion process slowly restructuring the glass to form photonic crystals—and this particular shard's shimmering mirror-like gold sheen is a rare example with unusual optical properties.” Scientists are borrowing nature's technique to make various interesting materials.
- Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be - HT to DoctorStrangelove for Daniel Jassy's sceptical take on fusion: ”After having worked on nuclear fusion experiments for 25 years at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, I began to look at the fusion enterprise more dispassionately in my retirement. I concluded that a fusion reactor would be far from perfect, and in some ways close to the opposite.”
- Somebody Stole My Laptop, Then A Ragtag Crew of Strangers Got It Back - ”I went on a Flight Free holiday and ended up being a sleepy mess, left my bag on a train, had the laptop stolen out of it, but a bunch of strangers conspired to get it back to me against all odds.” Phil Sturgeon posted this from the very laptop he'd seen wandering around Germany for a couple of weeks on Apple's Find My map
- Non-Heaven, Non-Hell Outcomes in Folklore - Daniel Lavery considers those characters in folklore who ended up betwixt heaven and hell: ”Perhaps you are too clever for your own good; perhaps you are perfectly balanced on the knife's edge between goodness and wickedness; perhaps you have outsmarted the Devil yet failed to please God. If you are a folklore character who qualifies for neither Heaven nor Hell, where else can you go?”
- Vanillagate? Ice Cream Parlors and White Slavery - Moral Panic in the early 20th century: ”Around 1910 there were few more dangerous places for a single white woman in a big city than the local ice cream parlor. Or so it was said… The US Attorney in Chicago, Edwin W. Sims, for instance, claimed he knew of more than two hundred cases of young white women who began their descent into prostitution because they had naively ventured into ice cream parlors.”
- Homesick - Zarina Zabrisky returns to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation after the brief Russian occupation at the start of the war: ”In 1986, my teenage love and I stole gentle-petaled poppies near Chornobyl, and in a nearby village, we made heroin and plans to get clean and build a home. We knew nothing of radiation… Two years later, I gathered the strength to leave my adolescent heroin romance—and fiancé—behind. I stumbled upon his name on the list of missing prisoners of war in 2022.”
- Picking Up Number Stations With A Tape Measure - ”This project explores the captivating realm of number stations from the Cold War era. This project demonstrates how a tape measure antenna, constructed using two 10-meter tape measures, can be combined with a software-defined radio (SDR) to intercept and document these mysterious broadcasts.” It can, of course, pick up anything else broadcast on shortwave; but Numbers Stations are the best
- DualShock4 Reverse Engineering - Part 1 - ”This year I got a very special gift for Christmas: a broken DualShock 4.” the_al is up to part 5 of this project, with a further part due soon
- Basic Shelter: Slum Life And Squalor In British Cities 1968-72 - ”From 1968 to 1972, photographer Nick Hedges was hired by housing charity Shelter to travel round England and Scotland documenting the lives of families living in slum and squalor. His pictures are powerful. You sense the cold and damp.” This article includes links to galleries of Nick's photographs from Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle, London, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Salford, Leeds, Whitechapel, and Bradford. This basement kitchen is in Liverpool 8, better known as Toxteth, the housing stock of which has been extensively restored in the last few decades so that it's now a somewhat exclusive area marketed by estate agents as the "Georgian Quarter".
Happy invoicing!
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