Some light (and some rather heavy) reading to celebrate the coming of the season of Bank Holidays 
Happy invoicing!
- The Devil Went Down to Georgia - ”For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name.” Dark doings in the time of the HIV/AIDS crisis
- Researchers unlock fiber optic connection 1.2 million times faster than broadband - ”Using an optical processor to operate in the E- and S-band ranges, UK researchers hit a transfer rate of 301 terabits per second.” Now Microsoft can make their software updates even bigger!
- Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, but Not As Modern As Some Skeptics Think - Stephen Winick examines the popular belief that bunnies, eggs, and other Easter-related symbols are of pagan origin: ”One popular story you might have seen recently involves the origin of the Easter Bunny. Essentially, the tale is that Ostara, the ancient Germanic goddess of the spring, transformed a bird into a hare, and the hare responded by laying colored eggs for her festival… So whom should you believe?”
- Frank Hyde - ”In 1933 Karl Jansky of Bell Telephone Labs had discovered 'Electrical Disturbances Apparently of Extra-terrestrial Origin'. So the science of Radio Astronomy had begun. Within two years a local electronics enthusiast – Frank Wilsenham Hyde – had built his own radio signal receiver.” HT to DoctorStrangelove for the story of Hyde, who achieved much but ended up being shunned for his dubious approach to the British Astronomical Association's property. The good doctor also provided the link to a PDF going into more detail about Hyde's life: Frank Wilsenham Hyde (1909-1984): Radio astronomer extraordinaire!
- Language at the End of the World - ”Of all the literatures in the world, the smallest and most enigmatic belongs without question to the people of Easter Island. It is written in a script—rongorongo—that no one can decipher. Experts cannot even agree whether it is an alphabet, a syllabary, a mnemonic, or a rebus.” One important question is whether the written language pre-dates contact with Europeans, which would suggest it was one of very few independent inventions of writing. A recent paper, The invention of writing on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). New radiocarbon dates on the Rongorongo script by Ferrara et al. presents some evidence that may support an early origin; though Kyle Gorman and Richard Sproat take issue with some aspects of that paper in Was rongorongo an independent invention of writing?
- The Eider Keepers - ”An age-old tradition in Norway illuminates the bonds between wild ducks, wild places, and the people who care for both.” Ducks!
- By law – it shouldn’t be Easter this weekend - ”Each year, people check their calendars to find out when Easter will take place because it changes every year — but nearly a century ago, the UK passed a law fixing the date. It’s just that the law has never been enforced.” Ian Mansfield explains the Easter Act 1928.
- Is It Even Possible to Become More Productive? - Kelly Stout considers the modern cult of productivity: ”I could only dream of a life in which I had too much work and not enough time to do it. That would be a sure signal I was believed in, trusted, and even loved. This way of thinking is now unrecognizable to me.”
- Inside an unusual 7400-series chip implemented with a gate array - Ken Shirriff digs into some old school TTL: ”When I looked inside a military-grade chip built by Integrated Device Technology (IDT) I found a very unexpected layout: over 1500 transistors in an orderly matrix. Even stranger, most of the die is wasted: less than 20% of these transistors are used, forming scattered circuits connected by thin metal wires. In this blog post, I look at this chip in detail, describe its gates, and explain how it implements the ‘1-of-4’ decoder function.”
- Czechoslovakian Folk Toys (1951) - ”All taken from the book Ceskoslovenske Lidove Hracky, over 200 pages of Czech folk toy designs and their history. We purchased a digital copy of the book, from DigiBooks as the real thing is very expensive.” Obligatory Easter chickens
Happy invoicing!
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