I've finished with work for the year! Nothing but food and films for the next two weeks - and, of course, interesting stuff to read on the Internet 
Happy invoicing!
- To catch a catfish - The work of Detective Constable Rebecca Mason, who specialises in uncovering romance fraudsters: ”Turner had sent £240,000 in all, though this in itself was not unusual. As Mason looked further into the case, following the money through numerous accounts, she found they led not just to one person, but to a multinational network in which everyone profited from the same fake persona: ‘Kevin Churchill’. Mason tracked over 40 victims; the money totalled millions.”
- Extra-Long Blasts Challenge Our Theories of Cosmic Cataclysms - ”Astronomers thought they had solved the mystery of gamma-ray bursts. A few recent events suggest otherwise.” Fun with colliding neutron stars
- NASA’s MAVEN Observes the Disappearing Solar Wind - Meanwhile, closer to home: ”In December 2022, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission observed the dramatic and unexpected “disappearance” of a stream of charged particles constantly emanating off the Sun, known as the solar wind… Without the pressure of the solar wind, the Martian atmosphere and magnetosphere expanded by thousands of kilometers.”
- Slow Burn: The Emerging Science of Fire Deaths - And even closer: ”On a body farm in Texas, fire investigators and anthropologists learn how to apply science to fire fatalities.”
- Korean lunar mission provides a view into the Moon’s dark spaces - The Koreans (South) have found anomalies in the Moon’s conductivity: ”Despite one malfunctioning camera, South Korea’s first trip to the Moon has been labelled a success.”
- The Frog That Couldn’t Jump - The Koreans (North) are, meanwhile, busy controlling the means of artistic production, as Kim Ju-sŏng recalls from his time living there before he made it to the South: ”Aspiring writers in North Korea must register with the Korean Writers’ Union and participate in annual writing workshops. The KWU has offices in every province in the country. KWU editors evaluate each work on its ideological merit… There are particularly strict rules regarding how the leaders and the Party may be depicted in literature.”
- She made gods for 70 years: meet the matriarch of Singapore’s last handcrafted Taoist deity producer - ”Singaporean Tan Chwee Lian, now 92, has spent the best part of seven decades carving warriors and Taoist deities from blocks of camphor wood and painting them.” The family have been doing this work in China and now Singapore since the 14th century
- Bricked Xmas - Ho ho… oh: ”Reverse engineering Bluetooth LE LED light controllers, or How I Bricked My Christmas Lights”
- Reverse engineering the barrel shifter circuit on the Intel 386 processor die - Ken Shirriff with more on the 32-bit processor: ”The 386 also dramatically improved the performance of shift and rotate operations by adding a "barrel shifter", a circuit that can shift by multiple bits in one step… The main problem with a crossbar barrel shifter is that it takes a lot of hardware. The 386's barrel shifter has a 64-bit input and a 32-bit output, so the approach above would require 2048 switches (64×32). For this reason, the 386 uses a hybrid approach.”
- “Firelight Flickering on the Ceiling of the World”: The Aurora Borealis in Art - Various representations of the Northern Lights: ”The Inuit of Hudson Bay believed they were the lanterns of demons in search of lost souls; the Norse saw them as the spears, armor, and helmets of the Valkyries leading fallen soldiers to Valhalla; Greenlanders thought they were the dancing spirits of children who had died at birth.” This is the frontispiece to Fridtjof Nansen’s 1911 book In Northern Mists.
Happy invoicing!
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