Some light reading to distract you from the noise of new-build homes and wind turbines being erected in the broad sunlit uplands of your front garden 
Happy invoicing!
- The Extra Mile - ”After a horrific accident, doctors told Todd Barcelona that he’d likely never run again. So he and his wife decided to run farther than they ever had before.” An inspirational tale - not that it would inspire me to start running, but still
- The Owls Who Came From Away - ”Over the past century or so, barred owls have swooped across North America from east to west, inspiring wonder, admiration, and fear about the future of other owls, often all at once. Their story is complicated, as are the labels people attach to them. Are they native or not? And what can their presence in the Pacific Northwest reveal about what it means to belong to a place at this particular moment in history?” Some people think they should be… barred!
- How Denisovans thrived on top of the world: mysterious ancient humans’ survival secrets revealed - ”When life got tough, the Denisovans got tougher. The enigmatic ancient humans hunted birds, rodents, even hyenas, helping them to thrive high on the Tibetan plateau for well over 100,000 years.” Probably still there, but called "yetis" now
- “Morality and ethics should play no part”: Leaks reveal how Russia's foreign intelligence agency runs disinformation campaigns in the West - ”The Insider has obtained hacked correspondence from officers of Russia's foreign intelligence agency (SVR) responsible for “information warfare” with the West. The leaked documents, intended for various government agencies, reveal the Kremlin's strategy: spreading disinformation on sensitive Western topics, posting falsehoods while posing as radical Ukrainian and European political forces (both real and specially created), appealing to emotions — primarily fear — over rationality, and utilizing new internet platforms instead of outdated ones like RT and Sputnik.” Lies, damned lies, and social media.
- The Smallness of Mark Zuckerberg - ”Mark Zuckerberg is a small man — five foot seven, according to Google — but that is not very widely known, because the only images of him available to the public are carefully crafted to make him look taller… Making him look taller is important because everything about a brand and a would-be president must be crafted to evoke warmth, admiration, and good feelings so the people keep coming, keep reading, keep liking, keep paying.” See what I mean about social media?
- Victualling a Trireme: A Taste of Experimental Archaeology - ”The passage from Thucydides given above says the crew were supplied with rations by the Mitylenian ambassadors in Athens and that they ‘pulled and ate at the same time barley bread mixed with wine and olive oil’. This sounds rather as if barley bread, wine and oil were mixed together in a wet mush – possibly nutritious but not very appetising… Perhaps we can arrive at some other conclusion about the nature of the crew’s food.” Result: a recipe for Athenian ship’s biscuit which sounds quite nice
- Detect Migrating Birds With a Plastic Dish and a Cheap Microphone - ”Birds migrate at night for a few reasons. One is that it helps them to avoid predators. Also, it allows them to use the stars for navigation. A less obvious reason is that traveling at night helps these birds avoid heat stress. And the night air tends to be less turbulent, making flying easier… Radar echoes cannot, however, identify species. But there is another technique that can: recording the calls that birds make during their nocturnal travels.” I’d try this but living where I do, I suspect I’d just end up hearing things I’d rather not hear from the neighbouring apartments
- Freddie the WW2 tortoise - The tortoise that survived a V1: ”Its been a few years since I first heard a remarkable tale about a tortoise that had ‘survived the Blitz’ and was something of a local celebrity in a quiet corner of Tooting. It took a while to track him down and hear the full story.”
- Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor - Ken Shirriff does his thing: ”Even though the Pentium is a complex chip with 3.3 million transistors, its transistors are visible under a microscope, unlike modern chips. By examining the chip, we can see the interesting circuits used for gates, flip-flops, and other circuits, including the use of an unusual technology called BiCMOS. In this article, I take a close look at the original Pentium chip, showing how much of its circuitry was built out of structured rows of tiny transistors, a technique known as standard-cell design.”
- The Kaikidan Ekotoba Monster Scroll from 19th Century Japan - ”Snake woman, a man with unfeasibly large testicles and many more cartoonish horrors from a Japanese scroll.” This “fearsome horned toad” looks like the Cookie Monster
Happy invoicing!
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