Busy week for me as I move from one project to another. But I'm taking most of August off, giving me plenty of time to read more interesting stuff like this 
Happy invoicing!
- Disneyland of the Dead - Ralph Jones finds out about the problem of overcrowding in cemeteries: ”London’s Highgate Cemetery shows us just how hard it is to keep the dead buried.”
- The Unseen Fury Of Solar Storms - The perils of living near a star: ”Lurking in every space weather forecaster’s mind is the hypothetical big one, a solar storm so huge it could bring our networked, planetary civilization to its knees.”
- The Weird, Wild Business of Shrunken Heads - Myth versus reality in the Amazonian jungle: ”A guy calls, says he found some mysterious papers left behind by a dead relative who apparently shrunk human heads and bodies. Do we wanna come see? Uh, no. But we knew Mary Roach would.”
- Get a first look inside London’s secret Cold War tunnels - The Kingsway Tunnels beneath Holborn are being revamped into a tourist attraction, but Ian Mansfield has been for a look before they're changed: ”They originated as one of the deep-level shelters constructed by the government during World War II… So sophisticated was the equipment in the tunnels that at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the secret talks between the USA and Russia had to be routed via the London Tunnels, as only the UK could handle the encrypted transatlantic calls for the two governments.”
- Draw a Fish! - A simple concept: draw a fish, then watch it swim around with the fish other people have drawn. As far as I can tell, you can draw a new fish once a day
- The arcane alphabets of Black Sabbath - Graphic design meets heavy rock: ”To commemorate Ozzy Osbourne, we take a deep dive into the obscure sources for the titling designs on Black Sabbath’s early album covers.”
- ‘Monetised standing’: the art of being a film extra - ”A TV crew dispatched me to Blenheim Palace, and within a month I had monetised standing. They wanted 200 extras to stand in the forecourt, providing the background for a series of scenes set at a G7 summit… In gaps between jobs, an assortment of artists, coders and labourers played policemen, caterers and journalists.” Plan B?
- First TV Images of Mars - The first closeup of Mars was coloured by numbers: ”Mr. Grumm went to a local art store and asked for a set of chalk with different shades of gray. The art store replied that they ‘did not sell chalk’ (as that was apparently too low for them, only convenience stores sold ‘chalk’), but they did have colored pastels. Richard did not want to spend a lot of time arguing with them, so he bought the pastels (actual pastels seen below), had the 1’s and 0’s printed out on ticker tape about 3in wide, and his team colored them by their brightness level (color key seen below).”
- Reverse engineering the mysterious Up-Data Link Test Set from Apollo - Ken Shirriff with another bit of hardware form the Space Race: ”A box with NASA-style lights caught his eye—the ‘AGC Confirm’ light suggested a connection with the Apollo Guidance Computer. Disappointingly, the box was just an empty chassis and the circuit boards were all missing. He continued to poke around the warehouse when, to his surprise, he found a bag on the other side of the warehouse that contained the missing boards! After reuniting the box with its wayward circuit cards, he brought it to us: could we make this undocumented unit work?”
- Charles Millot / World Traveller / Orkney Visitor - From the Orkney Archive, the tale of a Frenchman who set out to travel the world: ”From 1902 to 1903 Charles Millot was a celebrity in the UK. Accounts of his travels appeared in local newspapers almost weekly. He purposely visited local newspaper offices to introduce himself and have his photo taken and the postcards printed, which he then sold to make money to fund his journey… Why? Well, it was all for a bet! He had wagered with his friends that he could walk around the world in 6 years, taking no funds with him, but making enough on the way from the postcards.” Here he is with the Scotch Terrier presented to him by the people of Dundee, which he imaginatively named Dundee
Happy invoicing!
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