Bit late because I've had a busy morning, but taking the time to read this lot should ensure you have a less busy afternoon 
Happy invoicing!
- Rescuing the Rescuer: Saving Myself from a Lifetime of Hurt - ”How witnessing trauma after trauma on the mountain exacts a cumulative emotional toll on ski patrollers” Cathleen Calkins on the consequences of spending years helping to rescue skiers.
- Why Covid Can Never Be 'Just A Cold' - Don't believe the people who tell you Covid is, or can become, trivial: ”If covid is here in three hundred years, it won’t be a cold. Why? Because Sarscov2 infects cells in the human body in a very different way to any other virus that causes a cold.”
- The Cult of AI - Robert Evans is unimpressed by what he sees at CES: ”Among the early adopter set, people couldn’t wait for the chance to hand over more of their agency to a glorified chatbot. This is where the feeling of doom started building in my gut… As I watched the hype cycle unfold, my mind wasn’t drawn to old memories of Apple keynotes or the shimmering excitement of the first dotcom boom. Instead, I thought about cults.”
- Getting Pickled With Joseph Stalin - In vino veritas, but do you really want to tell Stalin the veritas? You might not have much choice: ”As he aged, Stalin moderated his own consumption of spirits, but he liked to spur others to overdo it and then watch their behavior… Toasts were proposed in rapid succession, and failing to empty one’s glass was unacceptable.”
- 127 Days: The anatomy of a Boeing quality failure - How did Boeing end up making planes whose doors fall off even where there isn’t a door? ”The Air Current has meticulously pieced together the fabrication and the journey of airplane 8789 to become N704AL, the Boeing 737 Max 9 flown on Alaska Airlines flight 1282… What comes next is the reconstruction of a mystery, including a sequence of events that has been assembled through interviews with directly knowledgeable people, and confirmed by those briefed on the situation, detailing a compounding series of quality missteps that put the lives of 171 passengers and six crew at risk.”
- ‘With Her Own Hair’: A Victorian Prisoner’s Art - The story of Annie Parker: ”Of the past 365 days she had spent 350 in prison and, by the time of her death six years later, had been arrested for drunkenness and other associated crimes more than 400 times. Sitting in her cell, she cross-stitched on bleached linen. It was not thread she stitched with, but her own hair.”
- Tech In Plain Sight: Windshield Frit - HT to vetran for this explainer of the little black dots around your windscreen: ”You know the black band around your car’s windshield? That’s a frit (which, by the way, can also mean ingredients used in making glass) or, sometimes, a frit band. What’s more, it probably fades out using a series of dots like a halftone image, right? Think that’s just for aesthetics? Think again.”
- Would the Lone Ranger’s silver bullets have tarnished? - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this important scientific enquiry: ”The Lone Ranger was a television series that ran from 1949 to 1957 and recounted the adventures of a former Texas Ranger who with his companion, the Native American Tonto, fought outlaws in the Old West. His trademarks were a black mask and silver bullets!”
- The Disgusting But Logical Implications of Star Trek Food Replication Technology - You’ll never see the replicator in the same light again: ”In 176 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the food replicator was used to make food or drink 372 times. Of those, 311 times it was shown being used by Captain Picard to order ‘Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.’… In all of those hundreds of cups of tea, he never bothered looking at the FAQ for the thing and figuring out how to put in a shortcut for the order.”
- Get ‘Em In! Portraits of Drinkers in London Pubs - ”Photographer Marco Sconocchia has been taking picture of us down the pub. His portraits of people in London pubs is on show at the Italian Institute of Culture from 26 January-3 March.” This one’s in Ladbroke Grove
Happy invoicing!
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