Some stuff to while away the time until the Vernal Equinox 
Happy invoicing!
- The Holocaust Angle - Some people on Alderney didn't want any development happening there, and turned to the notion of Nazi war crimes to bolster their case: ”It might have been left at that, another crackpot proposition in a supposedly ‘post-truth’ moment, if the existence of a mass grave on Longis hadn’t proved convenient for a consortium aiming to halt the construction of an electrical interconnector… Six years ago, I found myself a pawn in the public relations strategy of a few such individuals. Over the time I’ve known them, their plan has succeeded—not only in blocking the interconnector, but in revising the historical record itself.”
- Resolved ALMA observations of water in the inner astronomical units of the HL Tau disk - Water has been detected in a planetary disk: ”The water molecule is a key ingredient in the formation of planetary systems… Here we present Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array data of the ringed protoplanetary disk orbiting the young star HL Tauri that show centrally peaked, bright emission arising from three distinct transitions of the main water isotopologue.”
- Mining helium-3 on the Moon has been talked about forever—now a company will try - ”Two of Blue Origin's earliest employees, former President Rob Meyerson and Chief Architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here.” Probably a cover story for the construction of Moonbase and deployment of Interceptors against UFOs
- A Folklorist Looks at Ice Cream Vans - Owen Davies examines the history of the vans, the tunes, and of course the flake: ”The reason why a Flake in an ice cream is called a ‘99’ has attracted much press interest in recent years and the issue now has its own Wikipedia page. The Cadbury’s Flake was first widely marketed as a ‘99’ in newspaper advertisements in 1936, but there is no definitive explanation for why it was called a 99.”
- The urban legend that won't die on this deadly Bay Area highway - An interesting local variant on the Vanishing Hitchhiker: ”That night, as he sped toward a sharp turn, Meseke spotted a shimmer of light his rearview mirror. Then he felt a firm grasp on his shoulder that forced him to slam on the brakes… At 65, Meseke continues to think back to that moment 45 years ago and is convinced that an otherworldly being remains in the canyon.”
- 9 reasons why you should never, ever date an opera singer - never mind marry one.... - Lucy White speaks from experience: ”I first met a sub-editor, who became an opera singer. It’s not all bad (reader, I married him) but there are definitely some things to bear in mind if your other half is on that journey. As neither Verdi nor Puccini ever wrote, ‘it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll’.”
- ‘It never ends’: the book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake - ”Starting in 1995, between 10 and 30 people would show up to monthly meetings at a local library. At first they read two pages a month, eventually slowing to just one page per discussion. At that pace, the group – which now meets on Zoom – reached the final page in October. It took them 28 years.” I had a look at it in the local library when I was about seventeen, and decided not to bother
- 4D Knit Dress Skirts Waste - HT to vetran for this new approach to dressmaking: ”The MIT Self-Assembly Lab x Ministry of Supply have come up with a 4D garment construction technique that minimizes waste while being pretty darn cool at the same time. They’ve created a knit dress that combines several techniques and tools, including heat-activated yarns, computerized knitting, and 6-axis robotic activation.”
- The microcode and hardware in the 8086 processor that perform string operations - Nothing new from Ken Shirriff this week, but this older one is interesting: ”I explain string operations in the 8086, analyze the microcode that it used, and discuss the hardware circuitry that helped it out.” Although known as “string operations”, those instructions really worked on sequences of bytes, and I used them all the time in sprite rendering routines when I was writing DOS games for a living in the 1980s
- The Scroll Art Museum - ”Scroll art lets beginner programmers turn loops and print() into animated ASCII art.” Al Sweigart has put together a museum of these “fun-down” experiments for learning programming
Happy invoicing!
