For the eight hundredth time, stop working and read this stuff instead 
Happy invoicing!
- “The Trolley Solution” - A short story by Shiv Ramdas about AI: ”From the moment the text message arrived with an aggressive ping, Ahmed knew something was amiss. Oh, it read innocuously enough, just the one line from Niyati asking if they could have a chat, but he knew better… Whenever someone said that they wanted to have a chat, what they actually meant was that they had something to say to you that they knew you wouldn’t like one bit.” There's also a load of other stories available there from the Future Tense Fiction project
- The universe's water is billions of years older than scientists thought — and may be nearly as old as the Big Bang itself - ”A new study suggests that water first appeared in the universe just a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang — meaning life could have evolved billions of years earlier than previously thought.” Does this mean the ancient cosmic overlords are fish?
- Meet The Death Metal Singers Changing Vocal Health Research - There's more to Death Metal than meets the ears: ”With cameras down their throats, metal singers show how they produce growls, screams, and squeals without damaging their vocal tissues.”
- Are these chimps having a fruity booze-up in the wild? - Questions to which the answer is "Yes": ”Is there anything more human than gathering in groups to share food and partake in a fermented beverage or two (or three, or....)? Researchers have caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be similar activity: sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content.”
- Sword Swallowing, The Shocking Circus Act That Can Quickly Turn Deadly - ”Throat lacerations, perforated organs, and pierced hearts are just some of the complications that performers can suffer when swallowing swords, but despite these dangers, only 29 deaths from this ancient art form have been recorded in the past 150 years.” "Only".
- Odd this day - ”Happy 53rd anniversary, this unimprovable newspaper headline.” The anniversary was on Saturday, but it remains one of the greatest headlines ever written
- Staring into the mouth of Hell - Saturday was also the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and Chris Sams remembers the firemen who first attempted to deal with the situation: ”At 1:35 a.m. the fire engine pulled to a stop at the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear power station on 26th April as fires raged on the roof of the Reactor number 4 building and Lieutenant Viktor Kibenok deployed his men to join Lieutenant Volodymyr Pravyk’s power station fire unit to fight the fire. Within three months several of them would be dead, their bodies buried in lead coffins and encased in concrete whilst others would face long term medical issues caused by the extreme radiation.”
- The Naughty Words the FAA Removed From the Sky - Maybe this is why Trump seems determined to eradicate air safety in the USA: ”New FOIA records from the FAA shed light on the frantic effort in 2015 to rename navigation waypoints related to Donald Trump and reveal the list of naughty waypoint names that were changed over the years.”
- Making A Cassette Mass Storage Interface - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this project to go back to the good old days: ”[Mike Kohn] was working with some microcontroller infra-red communication projects when he saw that the same techniques could be used to produce a tape interface like those on the home computers of old.”
- Rewriting the Relationship Between Elephant and Keeper - Important work to improve the lives of elephants: ”In Thailand, elephant welfare is often pitted against Thai culture and history. One Indigenous elephant keeper offers a glimpse of a third way.”
Happy invoicing!
