Final week of my holiday, and at least the weather's cooling down a bit 
Happy invoicing!
- The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario - From the “jobs you didn’t know existed” department: ”To successfully catch a Canadian nightcrawler, you have to approach it a little like you’re a cat. The worm—fat, pink, undomesticable, and anywhere between five and 10 inches long—has made its way two-thirds out of its burrow, taking in moisture from the cool night air and exploring the surface of the soil for food. If it senses your approach, it will hurtle back into its hole with startling, uncharacteristic speed. So, crouched in the dirt, you must reach for it with a quiet, swift confidence.”
- Earth’s Core Appears To Be Leaking Up and Out of Earth’s Surface - ”Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size entities anchored to the core-mantle boundary might be involved.” Not now, Earth’s core
- West African ancestry in seventh-century England: two individuals from Kent and Dorset - Proof that immigration isn’t a new phenomenon by any means: ”Archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, can reveal powerful insights into kinship and the movement of individuals in (pre)history. Here, the authors report on the identification of two individuals with genetic profiles consistent with recent sub-Saharan African ancestry, both of whom were buried in early-medieval cemeteries in southern Britain.”
- An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this detailed history of American and Russian attempts to make bigger and better (?) nuclear bombs, culminating in the Tsar Bomba: ”The flash alone lasted more than a minute. The fireball expanded to nearly six miles in diameter… Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles. One civilian witness remarked that it was ‘as if the Earth was killed.’”
- Dedicated volunteer exposes “single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history” - Somebody has an overinflated idea of his own importance: ”Quick—what are the top entries in the category "Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages"? The answer is countries… But if you had looked at the list a couple months back, something would have been different. Turkey, the US, and Japan were still in the same order near the top of the leaderboard, but the number one slot was occupied by an unlikely contender: David Woodard, who had Wikipedia entries in 335 different languages.”
- My Scammer - ”I responded to one of those spam texts from a ‘recruiter’—then took the job. It got weirder than I could have imagined.” Alexander Sammon finds out what happens if you go along with the scam, so you don’t have to.
- Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way - I might have done better at maths O Level if they’d taught us through applications like this: ”This is an onion. (Well, a simplified cross-section of one.) We’ve cut it in half lengthwise, using a sharp knife… From here, what’s the best way to dice it? That is, how do we get the most uniform piece size?”
- How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet - A look back to those halcyon early days of commerce moving online, and the inevitable result: ”Designed to be hip, exciting, and fast-paced, Erin stood for everything Esurance believed in. She was not only the company’s answer to Geico’s ubiquitous gecko, but a formidable marketing tool for recruiting their intended demographic — 18 to 24 year-old males — into insurance policies. Unfortunately, that demographic liked Erin so much that they made porn of her. Lots of porn. So much porn that, at the height of the mascot’s popularity, 9 of the top 10 image results in an unfiltered Google search for ‘Erin Esurance’ ended up being these amatuer artists’ racy renderings.”
- Here be dragons: Preventing static damage, latchup, and metastability in the 386 - Ken Shirriff explores the techniques used to protect Intel’s processor from the harsh reality without: ”I've come across some interesting circuits for the chip's input/output (I/O) pins. Since these pins communicate with the outside world, they face special dangers: static electricity and latchup can destroy the chip, while metastability can cause serious malfunctions. These I/O circuits are completely different from the logic circuits in the 386, and I've come across a previously-undescribed flip-flop circuit, so I'm venturing into uncharted territory. In this article, I take a close look at how the I/O circuitry protects the 386 from the ‘dragons’ that can destroy it.”
- Mathematik 1. 1972 - More cool old designs from behind the Iron Curtain, via the elite stationers of Present & Correct: ”Found a very long time ago in Berlin, a GDR Maths book which is part of a series. Volumes 1 & 2 are the best of the bunch.” I assume the shelves in this supermarket were hastily filled just before the artist arrived to draw it
Happy invoicing!
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