Bit chilly out, but of course you have more sense than to go there when you can stay in reading this lot 
Happy invoicing!
- ‘Badass detective’: How one California officer solved eight cold cases — in his spare time - Detective Matt Hutchison adopts ingenious methods to get his results: ”Along with poking through trash, Detective Hutch, as he’s known, has posed as a busboy in a bar to gather DNA samples from a suspect’s chicken wings and traveled to multiple states to search for evidence and talk with relatives of long-dead victims who thought their loved ones’ cases had been forgotten.”
- Deep Beneath Earth’s Surface, Clues to Life’s Origins - ”Last spring, scientists retrieved a trove of mantle rocks from underneath the Atlantic seafloor — a bounty that could help write the first chapter of life's story on Earth.”
- The Most Dangerous Asteroid That Never Was - ”Let’s go back to April 10, 2020. The pandemic continues to spread and many countries are in lockdown, the Northolt Branch Observatories located in London, England spotted an object moving across the sky… 2020 GL2 was a risky one. It would have a 1 in 400,000 chance to hit the Earth in 2028.” Except it turned out to be one of ours
- The Bismarck Diet - Katja Hoyer suggests taking a lead from the Iron Chancellor for your New Year's Resolutions: ”Germany’s first Chancellor was under constant pressure from the moment he founded the German Empire in 1871. Like many people, he compensated for his burnout with food, tobacco and alcohol until he eventually became so overweight and sick that by the early 1880s, he was only able to work two hours a day by his own estimation… In the end, it was a young doctor from Bavaria who finally helped the Chancellor to permanently lose over 20kg and get fit again - without having to limit himself in his work.”
- London’s Most Inconvenient Plaque Marks A Forgotten Roman Site - Something to look for should you find yourself in Stanmore: ”For many of us, a trip to the very northern extreme of the Jubilee line would be adventure enough. How often do you take a ride out to Stanmore for the fun of it? But add to that a walk of over a mile up one of north London’s tallest hills, and then a scramble through a patch of overgrown brambles.”
- What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year? - The essential year-in-review piece: ”It's time to gather 'round the fire with your loved ones for our nation's oldest and finest tradition: reading about people that jammed things in their holes and couldn't get them out without medical intervention. All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's database of emergency room visits, all descriptions are verbatim, and almost all patients made some regrettable decisions.”
- 20 Things I Learned While I Was in North Korea - Been a while since we had a look at the homeland of the Dear Leader; admittedly, this one is from just over ten years ago, but I gather things don't change much over there: ”I’d find myself thinking, ‘Are you an actor in The Truman Show and you think I’m Truman? Or are you Truman and I’m one of the actors?’ Are those kids on the street just pretending to be playing for my benefit? Is any of this real? Am I real?”
- Free Magic Tricks - Cool Card Tricks And Coin Illusions - If the return to the office is getting you down, how about a change of career: ”Whether practicing how to do magic and sleight of hand as a hobby to entertain family and friends or to jump on board and take it to a professional level ? The choice is entirely up to you.”
- Interesting double-poly latches inside AMD's vintage LANCE Ethernet chip - Weird wiring from Ken Shirriff: ”I've studied a lot of chips from the 1970s and 1980s, so I usually know what to expect. But an Ethernet chip from 1982 had something new: a strange layer of yellow wiring on the die. After some study, I learned that the yellow wiring is a second layer of resistive polysilicon, used in the chip's static storage cells and latches.”
- The Wormworld Saga: Chapter 11 - Rise of the Firelord - It’s here! Daniel Lieske has published the latest chapter of his beautiful graphic novel
Happy invoicing!
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