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- The Sinking of the Bounty - ”Haba had never encountered a situation like this. An hour and a half earlier, he’d been snoozing on a lumpy leather couch at the air station when the call came in: A large wooden ship was in trouble 100 miles east of with 16 people on board. The ship’s water-removal systems were malfunctioning, and it was limping into the path of Hurricane Sandy… The distressed vessel wasn’t a yacht. It wasn’t a schooner. It looked more like a pirate ship.” The loss of the Bounty, a replica of HMS Bounty of mutiny fame.
- Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture - ”In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program.” Good news for fans of eigenfunctions
- Our new tech helps find hidden details in whale, cassowary and other barely audible animal calls - ”In a new study published in Ecology and Evolution, we show the limitations of one of the most common methods used to analyse animal sounds. These limitations may have caused disagreements about a whale song in the Indian Ocean… We demonstrate a new method that can overcome this problem. It reveals previously hidden details of animal calls, providing a basis for future advances in animal sound research.” Though as Wittgenstein wrote, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.”
- Rebuilding the Maze - ”After a crucial section of a California freeway collapsed, this formidable construction boss pulled off one of the fastest, riskiest, most high-stakes reconstructions in U.S. history.” Who knew rebuilding motorways could be done so quickly?
- Neil Armstrong: The Inspiring Legacy of ‘Muffy’ - HT to DoctorStrangeleove for this sad story of the early death of Armstrong’s daughter: ”Armstrong’s family members revealed that the future First Man on the Moon suffered greatly in the wake of Muffy’s death, but chose to display a face of stoicism and used his work as a coping mechanism. ”
- Sensitive Material - ”The story of early cinema may have been different had Wordsworth Donisthorpe been better at blackmail. Irfan Shah goes digging in the archives to recover the details of this forgotten polymath — political individualist, chess reformer, inventor of a peculiar kind of film camera — and finds a fierce debate about the history of English wool combing improbably implicated in the rise of motion pictures.”
- The Court Case That Destroyed John Gotti Wasn't His Own - ”As befitted the nation’s star hood, Gotti’s trial was like a rock concert… The funny part was that in the middle of all this, another racketeering trial was going on not a mile away across the East River in a Manhattan state criminal court, also involving the Gambino family, which would have far greater impact on Cosa Nostra operations than putting away five John Gottis.” How boring trials resulting in huge fines caused more trouble for the Mob than imprisoning bosses.
- Why Do Military Aircraft Have Nose Art Decals? - A look at the history of painting things on aircraft: ”Nose art painting began for practical reasons of identifying friendly aircraft. The practice then evolved to express the individuality of the planes… It continued into the Korean conflict albeit much bigger due to the B-29 bombers which had plenty of space for larger than life designs.”
- Inside an IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981 - Ken Shirriff does his thing: ”The board is arranged as a grid of squares with the PCB traces too small to see unless you zoom in. Most of the decoupling capacitors are in IBM's thin, rectangular packages, although I see a few capacitors in more standard blue packages. IBM is almost a parallel universe with its unusual packaging for ICs and capacitors as well as the strange circuit board appearance.”
- Failure.Museum – Exploring Failed Ideas & Ventures - A collection of things that failed, assembled by Sean Jacobsohn: ”Our purpose is to discover the main ‘lessons learned’ from failed ideas in business, products, sports and toys.” Not sure why this bacon lip balm and air freshener failed to take off in 2009
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