If it's anything like it is here where you are, it's perfect weather for staying home with the Internet for company 
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- The Truth Is Out There - ”A father’s disappearance, dark family secrets, and the hunt for Bigfoot.” Katya Cengel on the strange case of a father's disappearance and his son's search for things that may not exist.
- Meet Strange Metals: Where Electricity May Flow Without Electrons - ”For 50 years, physicists have understood current as a flow of charged particles. But a new experiment has found that in at least one strange material, this understanding falls apart.” My decades-old physics A Level seems increasingly valueless nowadays
- How does it feel to have an octopus arm? This robo-tentacle lets people find out - Eight of these for Christmas, please: ”The robotic tentacle consists of five segments made of soft silicone embedded with ‘wires’ made from metal that is liquid at room temperature… Like a real octopus arm, the octobot can expand to 1.5 times its original length as it reaches for its target.”
- My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story - Chris Lewicki on the time he messed up when testing Mars rover Spirit: ”It was a test I had performed numerous times. My various roles on the project had given me the experience to decipher the maze of diagrams mapping the 10,000 pin-to-pin connections that made everything on the spacecraft work… The pulse was sent to the motor. As always, the result was immediate, but this time, alarmingly unfamiliar. The strip chart did not look like anything we had seen before. It did not even look like a broken motor. It was decidedly — something else.”
- Neanderthals: More knowable now than ever - Not as dumb as we used to think they were: ”Most researchers see no reason to believe our two species didn’t get along with each other back then, yet we haven’t been very kind to Neanderthals since their remains were first unearthed in the 19th century, often characterizing them as lumbering dimwits or worse… there is no evidence they engaged in any kind of prehistoric hooliganism.”
- Tyrian purple: The lost ancient pigment that was more valuable than gold - ”For millennia, Tyrian purple was the most valuable colour on the planet. Then the recipe to make it was lost. By piecing together ancient clues, could one man bring it back?” Interesting to note that the main reason the technique has been lost for centuries is that nobody bothered to write any documentation. Plus ça change
- Molyneux And Minter - The Story Of The Lost GameCube Exclusive 'Unity' - ”In January 2003, legendary British game developer Jeff Minter and the Guildford-based development studio Lionhead announced Unity — a brand new game for the Nintendo GameCube that was set to combine a psychedelic virtual light synthesizer with groundbreaking shoot 'em-up mechanics… After roughly two years of work, Lionhead and Minter shockingly announced in 2004 that they had decided to cancel the project.” The history of a lost game from some of the greats of the industry.
- Scopin' Sans - ”An open source typeface for hardware people! (it renders text like serial data viewed on an oscilloscope)” A handy font if you want to relive the days of debugging data by looking at the individual bits as electrical signal levels
- Inside the Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit - Ken Shirriff continues his exploration of the 80386: ”The Intel 386 processor (1985) was a pivotal development for Intel as it moved x86 to CMOS (as well as being the first 32-bit x86 processor). The 386's CMOS circuitry required four clock signals. An external crystal oscillator provided the 386 with a single clock signal and the 386's internal circuitry generated four carefully-timed internal clock signals from the external clock.”
- Guitars, Wash Boards, and Tea Chests: How Skiffle Became the 1950s Punk - ”Before rock and roll would sweep through the landscape and the consciousness of the youth, a forgotten musical genre held a nation in its grip. A rhythmic, urgent music of expression and movement that was simple and accessible due to the addition of improvised homemade instrumentation, it let anyone form a band, and many did. In 1957, when a 15-year-old Paul McCartney first saw a 16-year-old John Lennon playing a gig at a Village Fete in Liverpool, Lennon wasn’t playing rock and roll, he was playing skiffle.” Time for a revival? Don't forget the cowbell
Happy invoicing!
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