My brother gave me a stinking cold for Christmas, but it's improved just enough to let me get this lot posted so I can go back to wondering if I'll be able to manage work tomorrow 
Happy invoicing!
- An Icelandic Town Goes All Out to Save Baby Puffins - ”Two small, round eyes glint like shiny black sequins in the flashlight beam sweeping under the truck bed. It’s a cold, rainy September night, and the dark figure huddled in the shallow space below is barely visible—but for its striking white chest… 9-year-old Sigrún Anna Valsdóttir, peering under the truck bed, and 12-year-old Rakel Rut Rúnarsdóttir, shining the light, don’t seem to notice the time or the cold. They’re on a mission to rescue a puffling.” The islanders of Heimaey start rescuing puffins from an early age
- Quanta magazine: 2023 in Review - I post quite a few links to Quanta as they run a lot of good articles. Here's their roundup of the best of last year, so you can catch up on the ones I missed
- Deep in the Wilderness, the World’s Largest Beaver Dam Endures - ”The largest beaver dam on Earth was discovered via satellite imagery in 2007, and since then only one person has trekked into the Canadian wild to see it. It’s a half-mile long and has created a 17-acre lake in the northern forest — a testament to the beaver’s resilience.” Reading the account of Rob Mark's 2014 journey there and back, it's hardly surprising he's the only person to have been to see it
- A forensic artist has given a 500-year-old Inca “ice maiden” a face - ”In 1995, archaeologists discovered the frozen, mummified remains of a young Inca girl high in the mountains of Peru, thought to have died as part of a sacrificial ritual known as Capacocha (or Ohapaq hucha). In late October, we learned how she most likely looked in life, thanks to a detailed reconstruction by Swedish forensic article Oscar Nilsson.” The kids may have been annoying over the festive season, but at least you weren't expected to send one of them off to be clubbed to death up a mountain
- Usborne’s ‘The KnowHow Book of Spycraft’, 1975 - The death of both my parents last year means I've had to start the process of retrieving boxes of my stuff from their loft, and in one of them was my first edition of this excellent book: ”Seemingly set in an unspecified, vaguely Mitteleuropean locale, The KnowHow Book of Spycraft, with its sprightly text by Judy Hindley, took as its template not the Bonds but the unprepossessing agents of le Carré’s Circus… Despite its cheery mien and brightly-colored illustrations, however, there is an oddly lugubrious undertone to the book. No hint of what secrets are being exchanged is given, nor of what forces the agents represent—but spies implicitly inhabit a dangerous world of subterfuge and deceit, and so constant threat must be presumed.” Here's a photo of the front cover of my copy
- The scrotum: A comparison of men's and women's aesthetic assessments - I reckon this study will be up for an IgNobel: ”Cosmetic surgery is a growing trend. Opportunities for an individual to attain their personal aesthetic ideal via plastic surgery have now extended as far as the genital area… The aim of the present study is to compare men's and women's evaluation of various sizes of scrotum, to the end of assisting people opting to undergo this procedure in taking decisions on their visual preferences.”
- New Years Resolutions of Yore: Vices That Became Virtues - ”In centuries past, things considered virtuous today; reading, cycling, radio listening and chess playing were deemed unhealthy vices. Amusingly this means some New Years resolutions set today are inversions of resolutions set in prior centuries.” Before you get too committed to giving something up, consider whether you should just wait a hundred years for it to become good for you
- Intercepted conversations - Bell Labs A-3 Speech scrambler and German codebreakers - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this interesting look at how the German army in WWII cracked the Allies' first telephone scrambler system: ”The efforts of Post Office engineer Kurt Vetterlein have been mentioned in numerous books, so that part of the story is well known. However there was also another team under the Army Ordnance, Development and Testing Group, Signal Branch - Wa Pruef 7 which successfully solved the A-3 system. As far as I know the work of this second team has not been mentioned in any book or article.”
- Santa Tracker Tales: Nearly crashing Google's servers, Leaking Santa's data, and Angering an entire country - Pamela Fox reveals some of the unexpected complexities in tracking Santa: ”Back when I worked at Google, from 2006-2011, I spent many a December on my 20% project, the Santa Tracker. In those days, the tracker was a joint collaboration with NORAD, with the Googlers focused on making the map that showed Santa's journey across the world… It was a formative experience for me, since it was my first time working directly on a consumer-facing website. Here are the three incidents that stuck with me the most.”
- The Hidden Territory: USGS’s 1950’s to 1970’s Isometric Geological Diagrams - ”The online archive of the United States Department of the Interior Geological Survey is a valuable resource filled with detailed three-dimensional territorial maps employing various representational techniques. Thanks to the work of artist, designer, and developer Jill Hubleys and their dedicated ‘X’ page, we’ve uncovered numerous isometric diagrams. Handpicked here, are a selection of them, including categories such as ‘Isometric Fence Diagrams’, ‘Isometric Cross-Section Diagrams’, and ‘Isometric Block Diagrams’.” There’s lots of beautiful stuff like this in the USGS archives, and it reminded me that for some reason, geologists always make the nicest maps and diagrams. This fence diagram shows the structural relations of the intrusions on Mount Pennell
Happy invoicing!
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