Token August heatwave day today, so slip into the shade and pass the time with this lot 
Happy invoicing!
- I was raised in a utopian commune where children ran wild. Only years later did I realise how much danger came with that freedom - Susanna Crossman on her unusual upbringing: ”It was all I knew: a radical, hippy, back‑to‑nature fantasy where children and adults were meant to be equals. But was it as idyllic as it seemed?”
- Saturn’s moon Mimas may hide a surprisingly young ocean - It's wet out there: ”The existence of another watery world in the outer solar system may offer clues to how such seas form — and hope for another spot to search for life.”
- The Very Hungry Urchins - ”Researchers are restoring the Caribbean’s surprising, spiky custodians, which gobble up the algae smothering coral reefs.” Sadly, Hakai has announced it will close at the end of the year, so I don't know where we'll get our oceanographic news then
- The World’s Secret Fabric - ”Most of the world’s fungi remains mysterious to us. We should get to know them while we can.” Brad Holman on the history and future of mycology.
- Scrabble, Anonymous - Recovering alcoholic Brad Phillips considers whether replacing his addiction to booze with an addiction to Scrabble is a good thing or not: ”This morning… I realized that the letters in CAUTIONED can be rearranged to spell EDUCATION. This seemed vastly better than waking up with no memory of the previous night, worried about what I may have done or said. Nonetheless, the thinking is obsessive and constant.”
- The Untold Story of An Ancient African Alphabet Born from a Dream - ”In the 19th century, a man living in present-day Liberia dreamed of the first script for his native Vai language. Today linguistic anthropologists are digging into the script’s evolution—and what the changes over the past two centuries reveal about human cognition and society.”
- Grand Comics Database - On Twitter, I mentioned to comic writer Gail Simone that my Dad used to write Commando war stories, and a chap popped up this morning to suggest I contribute any details I have of his work to this site: ”The Grand Comics Database (GCD) is a nonprofit, internet-based organization of international volunteers dedicated to building an open database covering all printed comics throughout the world.”
- The bus stop: The post-fame fate of Bob Grant - The sad story of the actor who played the cheeky conductor in On The Buses: ”It's been said that celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. It's also true that some roles become a cell in which the soul is left to rot. One comic actor who faced the latter fate was Bob Grant. His role as the lecherous shop steward in the 1970s sitcom On The Buses was the one that made him, but also, alas, the one that broke him.”
- ASCII - Rob Napier on the history of everybody's favourite code for information interchange: ”Every part of this post is over-simplified. History is messy and difficult to sum up. The original version was twice as long and still over-simplified. Just go with it.”
- The Tiles Collection - From the museums of the Netherlands, a huge collection of tiles, though there are plenty of other collections on the site: ”The Memory is a database containing paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, ceramics, stamps, posters and newspaper clippings from more than a hundred Dutch museums, archives and libraries.” This tile, "Vogel op grondje" (Bird on ground) is from South Holland, 1600-1630
Happy invoicing!
