Not that there are any Teams meetings. I'm back from my break, but my contract manager is OoO at a training thing all week and has left no word, so I've no idea what I'm supposed to be working on or who with! Might just take another week off reading stuff like this 
Happy invoicing!
- Down in that metal nightmare: Untold stories of the Key Bridge disaster - Personal accounts from the Baltimore bridge collapse: ”A husband’s last kiss as he left for work. A phone ringing and ringing in the dark. The snow of concrete dust on the river and the groan of broken steel in the current. Ten seconds, that’s it. Steel and concrete that marked the Baltimore skyline for almost half a century crumpled like a child’s toy.”
- The Unraveling of Space-Time - ”Many physicists suspect we are in for a radical reunderstanding of reality, as big as the one Albert Einstein orchestrated more than a century ago… A belief has come to dominate theoretical physics that even nothingness ought to come from something — that space-time must break up into more primitive building blocks that don’t themselves inhabit space or time.” A special edition of Quanta with a bunch of articles about what this "stuff" we exist in might actually be.
- Mars’ Missing Atmosphere Could Be Hiding In Plain Sight - ”Mars wasn’t always the cold desert we see today. There’s increasing evidence that water once flowed on the Red Planet’s surface, billions of years ago. And if there was water, there must also have been a thick atmosphere to keep that water from freezing… Where exactly did Mars’ atmosphere go?” A new geological theory could have implications for exploration of Mars.
- Identification of a senior officer from Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition - The remains of one of the officers of HMS Erebus have been identified: ”Arctic Canada’s King William Island and Adelaide Peninsula have preserved the unidentified skeletal remains of many of the 105 sailors who perished while trying to escape the Arctic at the end of the 1845–1848 Franklin Northwest Passage expedition. Over the past decade, we have attempted to identify those individuals through DNA analysis using samples obtained from living descendants.”
- London’s magnificent flying machines - HT to ladymuck for this forgotten bit of London history: ”Sir Hiram Maxim, an American born British inventor created many novel things such has the first machine guns, ship detection systems, hair curlers, illuminated gas signs, automated sprinkler systems, mousetraps, and even aeroplanes… Perhaps the most famous fundraising idea he persued was to build a fun fair themed ride using gondolas styled as aeroplanes. These had a considerable measure of success and and were known as ‘captive flying machines.’ What history rarely tells us however is the very earliest of these wonderful funfair machines were put through their first paces at Norwood in South London.”
- Myth-Busting - Mark Davyd explains how the money from big ticket shows really gets divvied up: ”Ticket prices, and the practices that go with them, are obviously a hot topic right now following the release of the Oasis Live 2025 tickets… Much of what you are about to read is my best guess at what’s happening based on forty years of experience of live shows, promoting, ticketing and venue costs. Let’s start where the focus of public attention has been and that is with the ticketing company.”
- A century of motorways - A hundred years ago this month, the first motorway opened: ”In a world of horse-drawn carts and steam trains, in a country where virtually nobody drove a car, in a city of nineteenth-century splendour, it was a giddying vision of the future. You would not have seen anything like it before – indeed, you couldn’t have, because there had literally never been anything like it. On 21 September 1924, Milan witnessed the opening of the world’s first motorway, the Autostrada Milano-Laghi.”
- MOSAIC, a semi-secret early computer related to ACE - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this piece about a little-known early computer at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern: ”The computer itself had storage for 1024 40-bit words in mercury delay lines, involving nearly a ton of triple- distilled mercury… Whilst it was no doubt very valuable in defence circles, its design had little influence on the mainstream of computer development. In view of the price of mercury, perhaps this was just as well.”
- Reverse-engineering a three-axis attitude indicator from the F-4 fighter plane - Ken Shirriff is at it again: ”We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that uses a rotating ball to show the aircraft's orientation and direction. In a normal aircraft, the artificial horizon shows the orientation in two axes (pitch and roll), but the F-4 indicator uses a rotating ball to show the orientation in three axes, adding azimuth (yaw). It wasn't obvious to me how the ball could rotate in three axes: how could it turn in every direction and still remain attached to the instrument?”
- 10 American Fighter Aircraft Killed by Fate - ”Since the early 1940s, the United States has created some of the most capable fighter aircraft in the world. But the road to designing, building and then selling something as technologically demanding as a fighter is not easy, and many – often brilliant – planes fell by the wayside.” This is the Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender, sadly doomed by its unfortunate tendency to drop out of the sky
Happy invoicing!
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