January drags on and apparently won't be over for nearly three weeks yet, so here's some stuff to help pass the time 
Happy invoicing!
- The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real - ”The inside story of the teenager whose ‘swatting’ calls sent armed police racing into hundreds of schools nationwide—and the private detective who tracked him down.” The USA continues to be a very peculiar place
- Rational or Not? This Basic Math Question Took Decades to Answer. - ”It’s surprisingly difficult to prove one of the most basic properties of a number: whether it can be written as a fraction. A broad new method can help settle this ancient question.” I’m not sure I understand any of this, but mathematicians seem to think it’s important
- The Fleet-Winged Ghosts of Greenland - From the new home of articles that would previously have appeared in Hakai Magazine: ”A mysterious population of peregrine falcons in the Far North has inspired environmental action and scientific research around the world.”
- C20 calls for Droitwich Transmitter Masts listing - The Twentieth Century Society wants to preserve those cool masts off the M5: ”Opened in September 1934, over the past 90 years the masts have broadcast such national staples as the World Service, Shipping Forecast, and Test Match Special, and played a pivotal role in WWII and the D-Day landings.” There’s more info on the transmitters at mb21
- Cars Need Buttons, Not Touchscreens - HT to ladymuck for this one, in which Andrew Miller argues that the ergonomics of modern cars are all wrong: ”Touchscreens make driving more dangerous. A moment’s thought reveals why. A touchscreen is just a pane of glass. As your finger scrolls across it, there is an uninterrupted feeling of flat smoothness. That feeling is consistent no matter what part of the screen you touch, and doesn’t give any indication to your finger as to what part of the screen you’re touching.”
- How a Would-Be Bomber Rebuilt His Life - Michelle Shephard meets a former terrorist: ”Zakaria Amara was jailed for his part in the Toronto 18 terror plot. Then came the hard work of redemption.”
- Meet the man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive - ”Steve Young's passion built a business that keeps historic tables running.”
- Inside Zildjian, a 400-year-old cymbal-making company in Massachusetts - ”From symphonies to rock music, marching bands and advertising jingles — we hear Zildjian cymbals everywhere. Drummers across the globe know that name because it’s emblazoned on every gleaming disc. What’s less known is the Zildjian family has been making their famous cymbals — with a secret process — for more than 400 years.” I remember the Director of Music at my school praising Zildjian cymbals, but he mistakenly thought they’d sold out to an American company; in fact, the family moved to the USA from Turkey, and still run the business to this day
- Century-Scale Storage - ”If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?” Maxwell Neely-Cohen considers the tricky business of creating resilient and enduring digital archives.
- Faces in Places: Mimetoliths - Sharon A. Hill on pareidolia and landscapes: ”The word ‘rock face’ is not usually to be taken literally. Yet, around the world, all cultures find familiar-looking forms that appear spontaneously in the mineral masses. Rock is supposed to be ‘stone dead’ but legends recount handiwork of the gods and entombed spirits that live on in local geological features. As we see pictures in the sky as constellations, we see faces emerging from rock.” This is the Sphinx Rock in Romania.
Happy invoicing!
autobraking FFS.
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