Back to work today, and they've got me doing work! Diabolical liberty, I call it 
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- The After Dark Bandit - ”The police couldn’t figure out how the perpetrator ripped off two banks at the same time. Until they discovered there wasn’t just one robber but a pair of them: identical twin brothers.” Been a while since we had a good bank robbery story
- Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2024 - Lots of interesting insights into everything from Neanderthals to the chimp-human-bonobo split: ”New resolution is emerging of some events in ancient human populations, and a clearer view of some parts of the genome.”
- “Divine Stramonium”: The Rise and Fall of Smoking for Asthma - How things were done before inhalers: ”Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the inhalation of fumes from burning preparations of stramonium, lobelia, tobacco, and potash became increasingly popular amongst asthmatics and their physicians throughout the world.”
- TimeMap.org — World History Atlas - An interactive atlas of regions, rulers, people, and battles throughout history
: - Possibly The Greatest Museum Of Soviet Empire Cars In The World - ”This is the Retro Museum in Varna, Bulgaria… It contains items from the period between the conquest of Bulgaria by the Red Army in 1944 and the end of the Todor Zhivkov regime in 1989, with a focus on products available in Bulgaria during that time.” Some of their Ladas are for sale, if you fancy one
- For those in Peril on the Sea: The loss of HMS Formidible - ”New Year’s Eve off the coast of Dorset the pre-Dreadnought battleship HMS Formidable brought up the rear of the 5th Battle Squadron… There was a feeling of disappointment amongst the men that Admiral Bayley had not reached port earlier so that they could have rung in the New year in one of the many pubs but missing the celebrations would soon be the last of their worries. Out in the inky blackness they were being stalked.” Chris Sams on the sinking of the battleship by U-24 on New Year's Day 1915
: - The Worst Ghosts of 2024! - Sceptical paranormal investigator Hayley Campbell with her annual roundup of crap ghosts: ”Fear not. These apparitions are not labelled as the ‘worst’ because they’re fearsome, terrifying, and probably going to eat your soul. No, they’re labelled the worst because they’re a bit naff and (spoiler alert) probably not ghosts at all.”
- Post Instrument - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this one: ”To assist in the identification and location of enemy aircraft, Posts were equipped with a mechanical sighting instrument mounted over a gridded map.” There's more detail on Wikipedia, but best of all is this PDF of Dr. Tom Ritchie's doctoral thesis in the use of Meccano: Object Identity: Deconstructing the ‘Hartree Differential Analyser’ and Reconstructing a Meccano Analogue Computer. And for good measure, there's the American equivalent: Bush’s Analog Solution
- Pi in the Pentium: reverse-engineering the constants in its floating-point unit - Ken Shirriff continues his explorations: ”Earlier Intel chips used binary algorithms called CORDIC, but the Pentium switched to polynomials to approximate these transcendental functions much faster. The polynomials have carefully-optimized coefficients that are stored in a special ROM inside the chip's floating-point unit. Even though the Pentium is a complex chip with 3.1 million transistors, it is possible to see these transistors under a microscope and read out these constants.”
- The best science images of 2024 — Nature’s picks - ”A breathtaking total eclipse, courageous penguins, volcanic smoke rings and more.” This seagull riding a turtle was photographed by Enric Gener
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