Running a bit late today! It's been a busy morning 
Happy invoicing!
- How HS2 built a bridge to nowhere - A remarkable story of bureaucratic failure: ”A state-of-the-art road bridge has been built deep in the heart of rural Buckinghamshire. Designed to carry traffic over the HS2 railway, there's just one tiny problem - there's no actual road.”
- Physicists Take the Imaginary Numbers Out of Quantum Mechanics - ”Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry.” Finally coming to their senses, are they?
- How the Witch of November doomed the ‘Edmund Fitzgerald’ - The ship made famous by the Gordon Lightfoot song was lost fifty years ago today: ”As the ship made its way out of port that night, meteorological forces invisible to 1970s forecasting technology were conspiring—the dreaded Witch of November was swooping in unseen. By 1:00 a.m. on November 10, the Fitzgerald was already reporting 60-mile-per-hour winds and 10-foot-high waves.”
- James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers - Sharon Begley died nearly five years ago. But she made sure to leave behind this excoriating obituary, ready for when the time came: ”Do read some of the many Watson obituaries, which recount his Nobel-winning 1953 discovery, with Francis Crick, that the molecule of heredity, DNA, takes the form of a double helix… What follows is more like the B side of that record. It is based on interviews with people who knew Watson for decades… Together, they shed light on the puzzle of Watson’s later years: a public and unrepentant racism and sexism that made him a pariah in life and poisoned his legacy in death.”
- Next-generation black hole imaging may help us understand gravity better - Good stuff coming from the Event Horizon Telescope: ”People have proposed all sorts of variants of gravity that go beyond general relativity and clean up some of the physics’ awkwardness. It’s possible that the extreme environment near a black hole amplifies the differences among at least some of these hypotheses. So, a group of physicists decided to see whether any of those differences might be large enough that the next generation of telescopes might be able to rule out some potential replacements for relativity.”
- He’s Hunted for Elk for 40 Years but Hasn’t Killed a Single One. And That’s OK. - ”Meet Carl Cocchiarella, Colorado’s least-successful elk hunter. After four decades of near misses, he’s learned that killing an animal isn’t the best part of a hunt.” I suppose it's a good excuse for a nice day out in the country
- Car Talk - Cynthia Zarin reminisces about her chequered history with driving: ”I turned off the nearest exit into the parking lot of the Sikorsky Aircraft company and got out. A guard gesticulated. I can’t move it, I said. There was now a considerable plume of smoke, and a few small flames—fire-fangled feathers. I can’t move it, I said. The guard looked at me, and back at the car. Well, he said, I reckon you can’t.”
- Itiner-e – The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads - A new interactive map and data source: ”Itiner-e aims to host the most detailed open digital dataset of roads in the entire Roman Empire. The data creation is a collaborative ongoing project edited by a scholarly community. Itiner-e allows you to view, query and download roads.”
- The Atomic Cake Controversy of 1946 - ”The celebratory event took place on Tuesday evening, November 5, 1946 at the Officers’ Club of the Army War College in Washington, D.C. The occasion was to mark the disbanding of Joint Army-Navy Task Force Number One, the body that organized and oversaw the first post-war atomic tests in the Pacific… ‘hat triggered the controversy was a picture that the commander of the Task Force, Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, and his wife posed for with Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry. In it, the so-called ‘Atomic Admiral’ is seen cutting into an elaborately engineered “mushroom cloud’-topped cake (with token assistance from Mrs. Blandy) while Lowry looks on with a smile.” Some people felt that the cake was more than a little insensitive so soon after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- Genders.WTF - A collection of ludicrous “gender” fields on forms. This one seems quite comprehensive
Happy invoicing!
.
Comment