Back at work this week. When are they going to turn Halloween into a Bank Holiday? 
Happy invoicing!
- Justice for Neanderthals! What the debate about our long-dead cousins reveals about us - ”They were long derided as knuckle-draggers, but new discoveries are setting the record straight. As we rethink the nature of the Neanderthals, we could also learn something about our own humanity.” Ugg!
- Fossilized Molecules Reveal a Lost World of Ancient Life - ”A new analysis of billion-year-old sediments fills a gap in the fossil record, uncovering a dynasty of early eukaryotes that may have gone on to shape the history of life on Earth.” Just a thought, but if we've been looking for the wrong things to find life on Earth, might we have been making the same mistake on Mars?
- Exactly When, Where And How To See The ‘King Of Planets’ At Its Best This Week - ”The solar system’s largest planet—and its sparkling moons—will this Friday be at their biggest, brightest and best in all of 2023… If you have a small telescope or even just a pair of binoculars you’ll never get a better chance to see its pinkish bands and giant Galilean moons Ganymede, Callisto, Europa and Io.” Not sure about "never" but it's probably worth a look
- The 200 Best Inventions of 2023 - Too late to invent something for this year, then: ”To compile this year's list, we solicited nominations from TIME’s editors and correspondents around the world, and through an online application process, paying special attention to growing fields—such as AI, green energy, and sustainability. We then evaluated each contender on a number of key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition, and impact.”
- The Twisty Tale of the BBC Show Supposedly So Terrifying That It Was Destroyed - ”’Late Night Horror’ was weird, innovative, and—mostly—will never be seen again.” Good to know that for at least some people at the BBC, their first thought on the arrival of colour television was “Gore!”
- Agency of the Subsurface - Geoff Manaugh on new projects mapping whatever is underground: ”Last summer, a geophysicist at the University of Vienna named Immo Trinks proposed the creation of an EU-funded ‘International Subsurface Exploration Agency.’ Modeled after NASA or the ESA, this new institute would spend its time, in his words, ‘looking downward instead of up.’… Archaeologist Stefano Campana, at the University of Siena, has launched a comparable project called Sotto Siena, or ‘Under Siena’”
- Britain's Largest Clocks Going Back - ”That's 'going back' as in counting down from 5 to 1.” diamond geezer on the UK’s largest clock faces.
- From the Beatles to Britney Spears, a History of Hidden Messages in Songs - ”The history of backmasking goes back to the early 20th century with occultist Aleister Crowley, who in his 1913 book Magick, suggested thinking backward by ‘external means,’ such as listening to a phonographic record in reverse… Musicians recorded secret messages backwards, inserting them into their songs.” Although most people wouldn’t have been aware of Crowley’s idea (I think I’ve only met one other person in my life who’d actually read all of Magick), the association of the technique with popular music inevitably led to a Satanic Panic
- Goose Generator by Dmitri Cherniak - This site generates random geese. That’s all but, really, that’s all you need
- Haunted Paper Toys - Some things to make for Halloween: ”Here you'll find a variety of rather unusual paper toys, all free for you to print out and enjoy. The toys include a hearse playset, coffin gift boxes (with occupants), a little cemetery, a few dark gloomy haunted houses, several unusual board games, some horrifying monsters, and quite a few other dark delights. So pick out some toys, print out the pattern pages, and with a few common supplies like scissors and glue you're ready to create all these strange little curiosities. I hope you'll enjoy them all.” This haunted lighthouse can be built with several different shades of light, or no light at all if you want the completely deserted look
Happy invoicing!
Comment