I forgot to revert the title last week after the holiday/Louvre special the week before 
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- The Blue Book Burglar - ”The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.” The saga of a prolific burglar of the 1980s.
- The bold idea that spacetime doesn’t exist - The physicists are at it again: ”The question of whether spacetime truly exists should not be particularly controversial or even conceptually difficult… Believing that spacetime is a real, physical entity is no more defensible than believing in the old idea of a celestial sphere.” They'll be taking lunchtime away from us at this rate
- How daylight saving time affects your health - ”Changing the clocks is linked to a plethora of health impacts – from heart attacks to car crashes.” If time doesn't exist, how do they explain this?
- The real reasons why firms suffer disastrous cyber breaches - HT to Paddy for this rundown of the organisational failings that lead to breaches: ”Want to know the real reasons why firms suffer disastrous cyber breaches? No, it’s not just about your firm’s use of technology.”
- London's thieves are burying phones in flowerbeds - Stolen phones are being hidden temporarily in public spaces and, as usual, the Met are useless:”Discreetly swiping the phone inside the victim’s jacket pocket, the thief made off… The thief took the phone around the corner to the Phoenix Garden, a small community-run patch of green behind Shaftesbury Avenue in the middle of central London. It’s a special space where volunteers maintain an urban oasis on a former bomb site for locals and tourists to take a breather. To the despair of the volunteers, Phoenix Garden is doubling up as a storage facility for central London’s stolen phones – and they can’t get the Metropolitan police to take it seriously.”
- The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries - Physically-based realism in art isn't everything: ”Shadows are so visually telling that it takes little to move into emotionally tinged narratives. But it is the visual aspects that we primarily deal with here, with a special focus on several types of misrepresentations of shadows — shadows doing impossible things — that nevertheless reap a payoff for scene layout and do not look particularly shocking.”
- Bhatia, P.I. and Three Card Caper - Two for the price of one with these entertaining short stories by Shiv Ramdas about a hapless paranormal investigator from Delhi: ”You can tell a lot about a client by looking at them… I rise to my feet. ‘Mrs. Bhatia, I presume.’ ‘You presume? I’m your mother, you good for nothing lout! Have you applied for a job yet?’ ‘But Ma, this is my job!’”
- Fairytale Hunt - Follow words and phrases through fairytales: ”Select a text section inside the sentence with your finger or mouse to use as a search to find similar passages from other fairy tale texts — using an in-browser embedding index and similarity search. Some text elements will award you points in the categories I've defined, common in fairy tales… The text is sourced from Project Gutenberg book fairy tales, processed into sentences and then classified for ‘descriptiveness’ using a small trained custom spaCy model.”
- Ghosts of the Queen Mary - It isn’t just houses that are haunted: ”The RMS Queen Mary, currently on display as a hotel/museum ship at Long beach was one of the grandest liners of a golden age long lost. However the liner is also remembered, not just for her luxury and beauty but (and thanks to the Museum/Hotel’s marketing team) as one of the most haunted vessels in existence.”
- Glass Ian Library - A collection of printed materials relating to glass: ”The purpose of this site is to share the author's collection of glass insulators, vault lights and other glass oddities.” These basement light manufacturers were behind St. Pancras station, opposite the church
Happy invoicing!
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