That's the Bank Holidays out of the way until August. Nothing to do now but try to look busy while reading this lot 
Happy invoicing!
- The Longest Journey - ”Lena Rowat skied 1,600 grueling miles across the Coast Range to quiet her demons. But she didn’t begin to silence them until tragedy struck.” Perilous adventures and tragedies on the Coast Range of North America
- Five-year study suggests chimpanzees strike stones against trees as form of communication - Bush telegraph: ”A recent study by behavioral biologists from Wageningen University & Research and the German Primate Research Center has uncovered a remarkable phenomenon among wild chimpanzees in West Africa: the use of stones to produce sound, presumably as a form of communication.” The full paper is here: Stone-assisted drumming in Western chimpanzees and its implications for communication and cultural transmission.
- The James Webb Space Telescope gets its own micrometeoroid forecast — here's how - ”Even as the James Webb Space Telescope is allowing astronomers to see inside vast, distant galaxies, it's also studying some tiny, nearby objects — albeit inadvertently… Since JWST's Christmas 2021 launch, engineers have detected more than 20 micrometeoroid impacts to the telescope.” The key to this detection is explained by Mike Menzel of NASA: ”Given its capability to measure nanometer (nm) wavefront errors (WFE) on its Primary Mirror (PM), JWST offers a unique opportunity to record Micro-Meteoroid (MM) impacts.” HT to Paddy for sending me this presentation Mike gave: James Webb Space Telescope Micro-Meteoroid Design and Performance
- Titan Submersible Marine Board of Investigation - If you've watched the new BBC documentary and would like more details, this is the official site with all the documents and video testimony you could wish for. ”The Coast Guard convened a Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) into the loss of the Titan submersible and the five people on board. The crew of the Polar Prince research vessel lost contact with the Titan submersible 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive on Sunday, June 18, 2023. After an extensive search and rescue effort, wreckage of the Titan submersible was located on the ocean floor approximately 500 meters off the bow of the Titanic.”
- Snorri Sturluson: Our Most Important Source for Norse Myth? - Turns out one chap is our primary source: ”The 13th-century Icelandic author Snorri Sturluson is our most important source for Norse mythology. But who was he and why did he write his books?”
- How Getting Shot During A Marathon Made The 'Bullet Man' A Better Runner - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this story of the man who was shot in the head while running a marathon, but finished anyway: ”Dennis Rainear was 10 miles into the Grand Valley Marathon when he was hit. Something struck the top of his head and nearly knocked him over. He staggered for a few steps… He looked at his hand and didn’t see any blood. So, he kept running and trying to figure out what happened.”
- The 1990s movie that needed a $90,000 White House - The story of a famous movie set: ”Clint Eastwood prowled his cameras around it for the tepid 1997 thriller Absolute Power. Lloyd Bridges stood in the middle of it as ‘Tug’ Benson in Hot Shots! Part Deux. It’s on display in 1990s hits The Pelican Brief and In The Line Of Fire. Yet the $90,000 White House set that was designed by a production designer called J Michael Riva was actually built for a rather sweet comedy: Ivan Reitman’s 1993 hit, Dave.”
- Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe - ”And other insane Star Trek facts you didn’t know.” There's a load of interesting Trek production lore in this piece, derived from the encyclopædic knowledge of fan Jörg Hillebrand, who knows so much that he's now used as a consultant on new Trek series like Picard
- Parsing the Infamous Japanese Postal CSV - Paul O'Leary McCann explains the problems presented by the Japanese postal service's official CSV file of addresses: ”It turns out the CSV file contains parenthetical notes for anyone reading the CSV file and makes reference to the order of the rows. This causes problems… This is only one of many issues with ken_all.csv. You can find people complaining about it regularly on Twitter, and there was even briefly a blog just collecting posts from all over the web about it.”
- The Archive - typo/graphic posters - As the title suggests, an archive of typographic posters from all over the world. This very cool bicycle poster by Benjamin Hermann is for an event in Neubad, Switzerland
Happy invoicing!
