Looks like we may get some actual spring weather by the end of the week, but here's some light reading to pass the time until it arrives - if it arrives
- Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife - Wendy Brenner on the joys of working at a picture framer's: ”Landscapes and dreamscapes, towers, harbors, mountains, forests, icebergs, beloved anonymous houses, beloved anonymous pets, psychedelic visions and graffiti, diplomas, hockey jerseys, vintage bicycle parts, photographs of every possible object or being, doing every possible activity. A little pencil line drawing of Warhol’s famous Absolut vodka bottle, his signature scrawled at the bottom… When I get home at night, I collapse in a chair, mute and unable to move. The art feels like a tornado whooshing through me. I feel euphoric and empty, cleaned out. Words and thoughts blasted away. My eyes scoured clean.”
- Mathematicians Marvel at ‘Crazy’ Cuts Through Four Dimensions - Apparently, four dimensions are more confusing to mathematicians than any lower or higher number, but they're making progress: ”In four dimensions, ‘everything goes a bit crazy,’ said Sam Hughes, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. Tools stop working; exotic behavior emerges. As Tom Mrowka of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained, ‘There’s just enough room to have interesting phenomena, but not so much room that they fall apart.’”
- A ‘World-Changing’ Underwater UFO—Caught on Video—Is a Legit Threat, Says Ex-Navy Officer - ”Timothy Gallaudet—former Chief Oceanographer of the U.S. Navy—believes the U.S. government should study ‘unidentified submersible objects.’” I’ll believe it when I see it
- On this day 27 April 1940: RM pilot with 800 NAS crash lands in Norway - A remarkable story from the invasion of Norway: ”A Heinkel 111 bomber was sighted and attacked by all three aircraft. The attack was successful and the German machine was forced down on the side of a hill about twenty miles South East of Aalesund. The crew were seen to climb out of their wrecked aircraft. Whilst following the Heinkel down after the attack. Captain Partridge realised that his engine was failing and that he would be forced to land immediately.” The two aircrews ended up sheltering in the same hut, and had breakfast together. It didn’t turn out so well for the Germans, though.
- Dwindle: a tapir's tale - When a storm breaks the sign on his zoo enclosure, Dwindle the tapir makes a momentous discovery. But can the crows help him in his mission to create a lasting legacy?
- Ukrainian Fighter Jets “Using iPads” To Control Western Weapons - ”The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer talked about Ukraine’s success in using tablets to integrate Western weapons on its Soviet jets.” A clever way of dealing with incompatibility between your platform and your weapons
- Trumptonshire Architecture - Tim Worthington on the architecture of Trumpton, Camberwick Green, and Chigley: ”This affectionate and half-serious half-not look at the houses, buildings, shops, sheds, walls, windmills and cider presses that appeared in the BBC’s equally affectionately-remembered children’s shows… came about as a direct consequence of that miserable first lockdown, and was in many sense a reaction to – or to be more accurate against – it.”
- The Boy Mechanic Vol. 1 - 700 Things for Boys to Do - Do they still publish books like this? If not, there’s a load of other good stuff along these lines on this site: ”How to construct wireless outfits, boats, camp equipment, aerial gliders, kites, self-propelled vehicles engines, motors, electrical apparatus, cameras and hundreds of other things which delight every boy. With 800 illustrations.”
- Talking to memory: Inside the Intel 8088 processor's bus interface state machine - Ken Shirriff is back to digging into Intel’s 8/16-bit processor: ”The 8088 processor communicates over the bus with memory and I/O devices through a highly-structured sequence of steps called ’T-states.’ A typical 8088 bus cycle consists of four T-states, with one T-state per clock cycle. Although a four-step bus cycle may sound straightforward, its implementation uses a complicated state machine making it one of the most difficult parts of the 8088 to explain.”
- Cold War comics about communism - ”This is a small but interesting collection of privately-published propaganda comics warning Americans about the menace of communism. Most of these date back to the 1950s. Now relegated to the dustbin of history, back in their heyday, the publications probably did more to shape the hearts and minds of a generation than any dusty political tome ever could.” This is from Korea My Home, published in 1950.
Happy invoicing!
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