Had a narrow squeak today when I almost reposted a link I'd already posted in 2018! Luckily I realised it was old enough that I might have posted it before and checked 
Happy invoicing!
- The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job - Meet the man who cleans up the things nobody wants to deal with: ”From murder scenes to whale blubber, Ben Giles has seen it – and cleaned it – all. In their stickiest hours, people rely on him to restore order.”
- A Simple Way To Measure Knots Has Come Unraveled - ”Two mathematicians have proved that a straightforward question — how hard is it to untie a knot? — has a complicated answer.” Though this doesn't explain why tying shoelaces is so hard
- Baby pterosaur skeletons reveal a tragic demise - ”One hundred and fifty million years ago, a destructive tropical storm blew across present-day Germany and took the lives of a pair of baby pterosaurs (Pterodactylus). The wild weather created the perfect preservation conditions for paleontologists to study the dynamic duo.” Sad for the pterosaurs, but remarkable that we can learn so much about storms so long ago. The full paper is Fatal accidents in neonatal pterosaurs and selective sampling in the Solnhofen fossil assemblage.
- An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1 - ”In a very real sense, the Internet, this marvelous worldwide digital communications network that you’re using right now, was created because one man was annoyed at having too many computer terminals in his office. The year was 1966. Robert Taylor was the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office… He had three massive terminals crammed into a room next to his office. Each one was connected to a different mainframe computer. They all worked slightly differently, and it was frustrating to remember multiple procedures to log in and retrieve information.” Part two is A history of the Internet, part 2: The high-tech gold rush begins, and part three A history of the Internet, part 3: The rise of the user
- The Great Pyramid Trampoline Caper - ”Say George...Wouldn’t it be great to put a trampoline on top of this pyramid?” The epic story (spread over a number of posts; the link at the bottom of each will take you to the next part) of how Ron Munn and George Nissen realised a dream: to put a trampoline on top of the Great Pyramid and bounce up and down on it
- DeSantis betrayed Florida's chemtrail conspiracy theorists by feeding into it - The Florida politician pandered to conspiracy theorists, and now nobody's happy: ”Since the state law went into effect, the Floridians who backed it have grown increasingly angry by seeing the skies just as marked by white trails as they were prior to the state law.”
- Yamanotes - Music for Japanese railway enthusiasts, where each station has its own little tune, played when a train departs: ”Yamanotes (/jamanoʊts/) is a web-based music box for playing the departure melodies of each station on the JR Yamanote Line/山手線 on the counter-clockwise (内回り) loop! The journey starts at Tokyo Station and scrolls continuously - click on any station to hear that melody!” More lines have also been added
- Dial-A-Poem - Fancy hearing a poem? ”First launched in 1969 by poet John Giorno, Dial-A-Poem began as a radical experiment: pick up the phone, dial a number, and hear a poem. Today, it’s a global network… This website brings together Giorno’s original recordings alongside those from each international edition in one accessible space. Click the phone to pick it up and hear a poem. Click again to hang up. Click again to hear another.”
- Enthusiasts bond twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records — a dozen screeching boxes achieve record 668 kbps download speeds - Dialup is so back: ”Multilink PPP worked well on an era-appropriate Windows XP PC, after progress using an earlier Windows ME box stalled.”
- Photographer Upends His Whole Life to Chase Auroras Around the Arctic - Dennis Lehtonen on devoting his life to photographing the Northern Lights: ”For nearly five years, I have lived in the small remote corner of the Finnish Lapland, above the artic circle. Since 2021, I have lived in a total of three different locations in Finnish Lapland… I have also worked in a total of seven different Greenland-based fish factories all in different, mostly small and remote, locations, despite hating fish.”
Happy invoicing!
