We're nearly at the season of multiple Bank Holidays! Until we make it, this lot should help to pass the time 
Happy invoicing!
- The Strange But True Story of the Witches’ Circle - ”I don’t believe in witchcraft, ghosts, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or anything else that can’t be proven to exist via science and logic. However, I am interested in all of the above… This is mainly because I spent much of my childhood reading Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World books. But it’s also because I grew up right next to a very strange place that would have given even the late old Arthur C the willies.” Paul Brown remembers the ring of oak trees near his childhood home reputed to be a meeting place of witches. If you find yourself that way and want to have a look, it's here: The Witches' Circle
- This Is the Most Detailed Map of Antarctica Ever Made - ”Scientists compiled decades of data to reveal the continent hiding beneath millions of miles of ice.” Now we'll be able to find our way around when it all melts
- The Coyote Next Door - Studies of wildlife coping with urbanisation in Edmonton: ”What urban wildlife can teach us about cognition, survival, and how to be good neighbors.”
- Virtual reality: The widely-quoted media experts who are not what they seem - Much of the headline-grabbing “science” in the news is made up by shadowy figures of dubious credence: ”One commentator contacted by Press Gazette does not exist and another declined to share credentials or other proof.”
- Retrotechtacular: [Walt] Builds A Family Fallout Shelter - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this Cold War classic: ”For civilian America, the Government created a series of promotional efforts to prepare them for the effects of nuclear war… The Family Fallout Shelter was a booklet produced in 1959 by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, and it described in detail the construction of a series of fallout shelters of differing designs. There was a concrete underground shelter, a partially buried twin-wall shelter with infill, and the one shown in the film, a basement fallout shelter made from concrete blocks. Our narrator and protagonist is [Walt], a capable bespectacled middle-aged man in a check shirt who takes us through the shelter’s construction.”
- David Rumsey Historical Map Collection - A huge collection of old maps: ”The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 35 years ago and contains more than 200,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, wall maps, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from around 1550 to the present.”
- Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese? - There’s more to cheese than meets the eye: ”Behind the approximately 4 million wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano produced annually, there is a tiny team of 24 battitori responsible for ensuring the quality of each one. Armed with a small metal hammer, these specialized ‘drummers’ tap every wheel after the minimum aging period of 12 months, and within 6-7 seconds they can detect if there are any defects, based purely on the sounds they hear.”
- Lizzie Magie and the history of Monopoly - HT to Paddy for this informative look at the tangled history of intellectual property rights around the classic board game: ”In 1973, Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at San Francisco State University, released a board game designed to teach players about the ills of real world monopolies. The game was fittingly titled ‘Anti-Monopoly’… It wasn’t long before the owners of Monopoly sent Anspach a cease and desist letter due to, what they considered, an infringement on their trade mark. Anspach ignored the letter.”
- A tricky Commodore PET repair: tracking down 6 1/2 bad chips - Ken Shirriff gets an old PET working again: ”You'd think that a home computer would be easy to repair, but it turned out to be a challenge. The chips in early PETs are notorious for failures and, sure enough, we found multiple bad chips. Moreover, these RAM and ROM chips were special designs that are mostly unobtainable now. In this post, I'll summarize how we repaired the system, in case it helps anyone else.”
- Vintage Architectural Stationery Vignettes - Examples of the glory days of ephemera: ”The images below are from Columbia University’s collection of commercial stationery, featuring architectural illustrations and gorgeous typography for factories, warehouses, mines, offices, stores, banks and hotels. Industries in this album of architectural stationery vignettes range from livestock, textiles, printing, roofing, and brewing to wagon works, cordage and merchandising.” I love the expression on the face of this steer from 1893
Happy invoicing!
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