Some stuff to read while the family complain about being stuck on a windswept bench on Skegness seafront 
Happy invoicing!
- All That Glitters - ”His alleged victims say he bribed New York Police Department officials, stole millions in diamonds, and persuaded Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Kim Kardashian to shill for a scam cryptocurrency. So why is Jona Rechnitz still free?” Being a grass can be a lucrative business in the USA
- Neanderthals invented their own bone weapon technology by 80,000 years ago - Further evidence that Neanderthals weren't as dumb as they've been made out to be: ”Archaeologists recently unearthed a bone projectile point someone dropped on a cave floor between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago… Along with the bone tools, jewelry, and even rope that archaeologists have found at other Neanderthal sites, the projectile is one more clue pointing to the fact that Neanderthals were actually pretty sharp.”
- Ancient horse hunts challenge ideas of ‘modern’ human behavior - Yet more evidence that proto-humans were pretty smart, actually: ”On a bright, late-summer day in north-central Europe around 300,000 years ago, a team of perhaps a couple dozen hunters got into their assigned positions for a big kill. Little did they know that remnants of this lethal event would someday contribute to a scientific rethink about the social and intellectual complexity of Stone Age life.”
- The Black Line - A sci-fi story by John Bull: ”It was a while before he even realised she was on the platform at York Road. He’d been running on autopilot. It was… God, what? Five years since he’d last seen someone there. Neville applied the brakes and brought the train to a halt.”
- Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Film Shows How Fascists Are Made - ”During World War II, Walt Disney entered into a contract with the US government to develop 32 animated shorts… On numerous occasions, Donald Duck was called upon to deliver moral messages to domestic audiences… But that wasn’t the case with Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi, a film shown in U.S. movie theaters in 1943.” And here it is
- Wikipedia:Village stocks - Wikipedia editors and admins have been known to make mistakes, and not just in terms of content. This page catalogues some of the most spectacular snafus. Accidentally deleting the main page has happened more than once, and then there's this: ”AmiDaniel… while reverting vandalism to the article Pea in 2006 with a new editing tool, ended up posting the entire contents of Christianity to the Main Page instead.”
- Girl With a Pearl Earring - ”108 billion pixels scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.” Now you can work out how he did it
- This Man Made the Modem in Your Phone a Reality - ”Broadcom cofounder Henry Samueli’s pioneering work fueled the broadband boom.” A history of the company and its technology, with contributions from the man himself
- The absurdly complicated circuitry for the 386 processor's registers - Another deep dive into silicon from Ken Shirriff: ”Like most processors, the 386 contains numerous registers; registers are a key part of a processor because they provide storage that is much faster than main memory. The register set of the 386 includes general-purpose registers, index registers, and segment selectors, as well as registers with special functions for memory management and operating system implementation… It turns out that the circuitry that implements the 386's registers is much more complicated than one would expect.”
- Flowers of the Sky - ”Depictions spanning almost a whole millennium - in chronological order - of comets, meteors, meteorites and shooting stars.” Nothing showing a Russian probe that never made it to Venus crashing into your greenhouse, but there's still time
Happy invoicing!
Comment