Once you've retrieved your trampoline from the neighbour's garden, you can relax with some light reading 
Happy invoicing!
- Blow up: how half a tonne of cocaine transformed the life of an island - High times: ”In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.”
- Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case. - The quantum mechanics are at it again: ”Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof.”
- Astronomers just deleted an asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster - ”The case of mistaken identity was quickly resolved, but scientists say it shows the need for transparency around spaceflight traffic in deep space.” I feel sorry for the amateur astronomer who had his prize of discovering an asteroid snatched away
- The time when India had dancing elephant helicopters - ”The exact date is difficult to pinpoint. Some claim that the legend of India’s ‘dancing elephant helicopters’ started in 1977 when the first one of its kind took to the air. Others say that it began earlier. Whatever the case, these colorful adaptations, designed to display military might, industrial strength and the country’s cultural diversity, have entered popular folklore.” I wonder how the trunk affects the handling?
- Wikenigma - an Encyclopedia of Unknowns - Looking for a question nobody else has been able to answer so you can cover yourself in glory? There are lots here: ”Wikenigma is a unique wiki-based resource specifically dedicated to documenting fundamental gaps in human knowledge.”
- Strange but not true? Did a US game publisher really get raided by US intelligence services over a fighter plane that never existed? - ”The hunt for truth in the legend of the F-19.” Robert Purchese on a quest for the truth about a 1980s air combat sim from MicroProse.
- The Turing Machine Made Real, In LEGO - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this one: ”Practical computers don’t quite follow the design of a Turing Machine, but if we are prepared to sacrifice its need for an infinitely long paper tape it’s quite possible to build one. This is what [The Bananaman] has done using LEGO as a medium, and if you’d like one for yourself you can even vote for it on the LEGO ideas website.”
- The Making Of 'Dancing In The Street' - Bowie/Jagger - Mark Saunders recalls being a quite young sound engineer on the classic track: ”It’s 1985 - I’m at Westside Studios in Holland Park sitting in the hot seat behind the large SSL mixing desk and about 10 feet right in front of me, Mick Jagger is belting out that epic line from the classic Martha Reeves and The Vandella’s Motown tune ‘Dancing In The Street’. It’s a year and one day since I got my job in a proper recording studio - a huge step up from the one I had in my dad’s cowshed in the Hampshire countryside. I can’t believe my luck. And yeah, David Bowie’s going to be singing next!”
- Interesting BiCMOS circuits in the Pentium, reverse-engineered - Ken Shirriff continues to dig into Intel’s fancy microprocessor: ”Earlier, I wrote about the ROM in the Pentium's floating point unit that holds constants such as π. In this post, I'll look at some interesting circuits associated with this ROM. In particular, the circuitry is implemented in BiCMOS, a process that combines bipolar transistors with standard CMOS logic.”
- Stories — Abandoned Berlin - Loads of urban exploration: ”There’s a zombie hospital in Weißensee… A former air-raid shelter built by forced laborers became the Banana Bunker during DDR days… Kraftwerk Vogelsang is a powerless power plant. People gave their lives building it and fighting over it…” and more! This is the inside of Niederlehme TSL 44, a Nazi fuel storage facility.
Happy invoicing!
