Is it just me, or does Mandelson Resignation Day seem to come around earlier every year? 
Happy invoicing!
- Brass Bands - Rachel Armitage heads to the Royal Albert Hall for some stirring music: ”The first brass band contests were held in the 1850s. The early proponent Enderby Jackson, inspired by agricultural shows, saw commercial value in encouraging competition between the brass ensembles that had started to appear across the country… There is still a sense of spectacle. Until recently, contests had a ‘deportment’ prize, awarded to the band that stood up and sat down as one and held its instruments at the same angle.”
- Nesting on the go: incubating White Wagtail travels 2,000 km - Well-traveled birds: ”Igor Urevc, a lorry driver for the transport company Infrastruktura Bled, began noticing a small bird waiting for him in the company parking lot whenever he returned from long-haul trips… The bird flew beneath his lorry and disappeared into the hydraulic system. Investigating further, Urevc removed a protective cover and uncovered an extraordinary sight: a neatly built nest containing four nestlings, approximately a week old, tucked securely inside the machinery.”
- Critical mass - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this one, in which Alex Wellerstein explains the well-known but less well understood idea: ”It’s a very tricky concept, one often poorly deployed and explained, and the result, I have found while teaching and while talking to people online, is an almost universal confusion about what it means on a physical level.” To help you get the idea, he’s implemented an interactive demo allowing you to play with the variables: Critical Assembly Simulator v.1.1
- American Spy Machine From WWII Featured by National Cryptologic Museum Ahead of Reopening - Another HT to DoctorStrangelove for a bit of Bletchley Park history: ”Nicknamed American Dragon, the cryptologic device was constructed by the Signal Security Agency (SSA) in 1944 to assist the British Colossus… Arriving at Britain’s Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS) in Bletchley Park on 14 October, 1944, the American Dragon was quickly appreciated. Just four days after its arrival, GCCS was requesting additional Dragon machines to assist in their operations.”
- SNAP-10, -10A and SNAPSHOT - And yet another HT to DoctorStrangelove for making me aware, via NASA PDF Identification of a debris cloud from the nuclear powered SNAPSHOT satellite with Haystack radar measurements, of the gradually disintegrating American nuclear reactor in orbit round the Earth: ”The SNAPSHOT reactor continues to orbit the Earth (currently at an altitude of roughly 1300 km), and will do so for more than 2000 years, according to recent orbital models… but, at some point, the reactor will need to be moved into a graveyard orbit or collected and returned to Earth – a problem which currently has no solution.”
- This L.A. woman was jailed as a WWII traitor. How a pair of perjuries ensnared ‘Tokyo Rose’ - ”Los Angeles-born Iva Toguri D’Aquino was convicted of treason and imprisoned for six years. Her case was based on testimony from two men who were later revealed to have been coached by the FBI.” She was eventually pardoned by President Carter.
- New Coke: A Warning from History - ”If, like me, you’re British then your knowledge of New Coke is likely to be (a) it was a massive failure, (b) everyone hated it, (c) it was a terrible business decision… Unless you’re new to the Internet, my very listing of those facts should tip you off that I’m about to debunk them.” It turns out people actually liked New Coke, until the Press decided that was boring and whipped up national hysteria over it
- ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering - Alex Harri explores the complex maths behind making the best ASCII art: ”Recently, I’ve been spending my time building an image-to-ASCII renderer… ASCII art looks so much better when shape is utilized. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer.”
- Notes on the Intel 8086 processor's arithmetic-logic unit - Ken Shirriff delves further in to the 8086: ”In this post, I discuss the circuitry that controls the ALU, generating the appropriate control signals for a particular operation. The process is more complicated than you might expect.”
- Inside the Daily Life of a Doomsday Asteroid Hunter - ”David Rankin is the closest thing Earth has to a space superhero. As an observer and operations engineer at the Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded planetary defense program that utilizes the telescopes atop the Santa Catalina Mountains, he spends hours looking for dangerous rocks that could cause catastrophic damage to Earth.” Photographer Levi Christiansen took numerous photos to accompany this interview
Happy invoicing!
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