Final day of my holiday today 
Happy invoicing!
- The Great French Fry Mystery - A peculiar crime wave in Toronto: ”When an A&W takeout bag appeared on my neighbour’s porch in the middle of the night—followed by another, then another—I became obsessed with solving a fast food whodunit that was as baffling as it was beguiling.”
- Unmasking the Sea Star Killer - Hard times for echinoderms: ”After a decade of carnage, we finally know what’s devastating sea stars along North America’s West Coast. Does that mean scientists can save them?”
- Scientists found the missing nutrients bees need — Colonies grew 15-fold - Better times for insects: ”Scientists have developed a breakthrough food supplement that could help save honeybees from devastating declines. By engineering yeast to produce six essential sterols found in pollen, researchers provided bees with a nutritionally complete diet that boosted reproduction up to 15-fold.” The full paper is at Nature: Engineered yeast provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybees
- Mainly Museums - ”Mainly Museums is a crowd sourced blog, run by passionate volunteers enamoured with museums big and small. We strive to deliver a personal take on museums around the world.” Lots of interesting places to visit; though it does seem to have a lot of North American museums, there are also a number from the UK featured.
- Jan Vormann Invites Playful Interaction by Patching Crumbling Walls with LEGO Bricks - ”Since 2007, Berlin-based artist Jan Vormann has used tens of thousands of LEGO bricks to patch crumbling holes in architectural structures around the world. His colorful bricks imitate the brick or cobblestone-constructed buildings he often ‘repairs,’ however at a miniature scale.” There’s an interactive map if you fancy going to look at his work: Dispatchwork. This one is in Paris
- Luck’s Children - It seems that living in a Communist paradise isn’t enough for some people: ”Jiménez Enoa draws us into the underground network that runs La Bolita, Cuba’s wildy popular—and illegal—daily lottery.”
- Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read - HT to sadkingbilly for this list of books that must be worth reading: ”From Instagram poetry to Greek classics, the works of fiction that have caused uproar through history – and into the present.”
- Pioneer Rediscovered: The Woman who Brought Female Representation to Games - The other year, I posted a link to an article about the search for the woman who created the game Wabbit, and it turns out the search eventually succeeded: ”Van Tran was found with the help of collaborators at the Video Game History Foundation… The big breakthrough came from member SoH, who had the idea of contacting the National Archives down in Texas to look through their bankruptcy records. Several of Apollo’s employees had to go through the court to get final royalty checks for their games, and as it turned out, Tran was one of them.”
- Lettervoxd - Josh Sucher gets carried away: ”Last week, my brother and I took in a screening of the 1976 classic Network that just happened to be captioned. As a result, it really struck me how impressive the vocabulary in that movie is… After a few late nights I am very happy to share Lettervoxd. Lettervoxd is a tool that extracts esoteric words from about 25,000 movies from the past century. It lists (nearly) every one-in-a-billion word that can be found in the giant corpus of subtitles I downloaded from Open Subtitles.”
- David Walker's Paper Clip Collection - The stationers at Present & Correct got something special last week: ”David Walker has been collecting paper clips from around the world for much of his life. He recently moved into a new home & his daughter has been sorting through his belongings. His clip collection couldn't make the move but was kindly donated to us… The annotation is beautiful, the locations of discovery and the overall aesthetic of the collation on cards and scraps of paper make us very happy indeed. They will be treasured.”
Happy invoicing!
