Would the last person to leave the government please turn out the lights? 
Happy invoicing!
- Electric mountain: the power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure - Deb Chachra on Dinorwig power station and massive infrastructure projects generally: ”Collective infrastructures – water and sewage, transportation, electricity, telecommunications – are good candidates for the most complex systems created by humans. They are planetary in scale, build on their own histories, interact with one another and have effects that extend far into the future.”
- Mysterious Lumps in Earth’s Mantle May Be Remains of the Crash That Formed the Moon - ”Chunks of a protoplanet called Theia became lodged within Earth after the two worlds smashed together, new computer simulations suggest.” So we could have saved NASA the trouble of going all the way there to get rocks?
- A Brief History of Tricky Mathematical Tiling - Penrose and more: ”The discovery earlier this year of the “hat” tile marked the culmination of hundreds of years of work into tiles and their symmetries.”
- The Medical Ordeals of JFK - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this exploration of Kennedy's medical issues, served from Google's cache because The Atlantic has started paywalling their archives: ”Newly uncovered medical records reveal that the scope and intensity of his physical suffering were beyond what we had previously imagined. What Kennedy endured—and what he hid from the public—both complicates and enlarges our understanding of his character.”
- Dispatches: Life on an Alaskan Crab Boat - ”A greenhorn photo-documents the lives of crabbers on Alaska's remote Saint Paul Island during a winter week on a crab fishing boat in the Bering Sea.” Lots of seasickness ensues
- The World’s Writing Systems - A handy reference should you keep mixing up your Cypro-Minoan with your Imperial Aramaic. ”This web site presents one reference glyph and basic information for each of the world’s writing systems. It is the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, a long-term initiative that aims to identify writing systems which are not yet encoded in the Unicode standard. As of today, there are still 131 scripts not yet encoded in Unicode. So they can’t be used on the computer — yet.”
- Greetings, from North America’s Uranium Ghost Towns - ”North America has its own Chernobyl(s). There are gold rush ghost towns, and then there are uranium ghosting towns; settlements which grew out of the ‘uranium fever’ of the first part of the 20th century and testaments to an era when fear of nuclear war led to an unprecedented rush for a previously low-value mineral. But what really became of these mines and the mining towns that catered for them?”
- Canada in Italy 1943-1945 – History told by Terry Copp - This project documents the contribution of Canadian forces to the campaign in Italy: ”Eighty Years Ago the Allied Armies invaded Italy, the so called ‘soft underbelly’ of Fortress Europe. What followed was twenty months of hard fighting. Canada’s Citizen Army participated in this fighting – and would go on to play a vital role in the liberation of Italy from fascism.”
- The Analog Computer Museum's Collection - Another one from DoctorStrangelove in response to xoggoth’s call for a return to analogue devices last week: ”The following list contains all of the machines in the analog computer museum. Unfortunately not all machines are described in detail currently due to my lack of time, but this will change in the near future.”
- Hospitalithings: A quiet observation of objects found in places of accomodation - Since 2017, this site has been documenting things in hotel rooms: ”These hotels stood in stark opposition to the natural world. Their rooms were uniform, with tightly made beds adorned with an excess of pillows and gilded bed runners that served no practical purpose… Since that fateful trip in 2017, my ritual remains unchanged whenever I enter a hotel room. I meticulously photograph the same eleven objects: decoration, door handle, hairdryer, keys, lamp, light switch, personal hygiene toiletries, remote control, shower drain, shower tap and the toilet roll holder.” They don’t appear to have visited the UK yet, so here’s a shower drain from Groningen instead
Happy invoicing!
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I doubled checked before I posted
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