- Castles in the Sky - An old diary hidden in Christina Lalanne's San Francisco home revealed a sad tale of parted lovers, ultimately leading her to Denmark: ”I opened the cover and saw in elegant handwriting the name Hans Jorgen Hansen and the year 1900. It was a diary belonging to the man who built our house. As I turned the pages, I noticed that someone else had written on them, too, a woman named Anna. How unusual, I thought, for two people to share a diary—even more so because, according to historical records, Hans’s wife was named Christine.”
- Did the Wow! signal come from this star? - Findings from the ESA's Gaia space observatory suggest a possible source for the famous extraterrestrial signal spotted in 1977: ”Amateur astronomer Alberto Caballero… has narrowed down the source of the Wow! signal. He might even have identified the specific star of origin. It’s a sunlike star – labeled 2MASS 19281982-2640123 – 1,800 light-years away, in the direction of the center of our Milky Way galaxy.”
- A New Theorem Maps Out the Limits of Quantum Physics - ”The result highlights a fundamental tension: Either the rules of quantum mechanics don’t always apply, or at least one basic assumption about reality must be wrong.” I'll go with reality itself being wrong. I mean, look at the state of it
- How German Librarians Finally Caught an Elusive Book Thief - ”For decades, often using a fake identity, he stole antique maps worth thousands of dollars each.” Not cool, Norbert Schild
- Soho 1983: A Girl's Guide to Peep Shows, Topless Bars & Nude Encounters - ”Soho in the early 1980s was very different from the throbbing metropolitan hub we know today. Back then it was still sleazy, disreputable and not a fit place for a lone 28-year-old woman to wander on her own after dark, unless she wanted to get propositioned by scumbags. So naturally I wandered it, repeatedly.” Writer and photographer Anne Billson republishes the article she wrote at the time about her explorations
- Verdigris: The Color of Oxidation, Statues, and Impermanence - HT to ladymuck for this exploration of colours: ”It was a rainy October day in 1886 and the Statue of Liberty was shrouded in a French flag. The weather was miserable and the ceremonial unveiling went poorly… Still, over a million freezing New Yorkers came out (including a boat full of suffragettes, protesting the statue). While it’s hard for me to even imagine standing inside a crowd of that size, it’s harder still to imagine the Statue of Liberty herself, as she looked then. Before she was the verdigris icon, patron saint of many a bespoke paint color, she was copper-skinned. Brown, not green.”
- Prehistoric Puppy May Be Earliest Evidence of Pet-Human Bonding - ”Prehistoric people likely cared for a sick puppy for weeks before it died, suggesting an emotional attachment to the animal… The remains — a dog, a man, and woman, along with several decorated objects made from antler, bone, and teeth — date back to the Paleolithic era, around 14,000 years ago.” The poor thing caught distemper, but the evidence shows the humans tried to nurse it for quite a while.
- The Imposter - ”Shaun MacDonald was an ambitious tech innovator whose start-up was going to revolutionize the crypto economy. His wealthy investors had no idea that their charismatic founder was really Boaz Manor, a notorious Canadian white-collar criminal.” A con man in the cryptocurrency field? Whatever next?
- Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior - Following up on Jamey Pittman's Pac-Man Dossier, featured in ML XXXV back in August 2010, Chad Birch goes into great detail on just how the ghosts in Pac-Man work: ”Each of the ghosts is programmed with an individual ‘personality’, a different algorithm it uses to determine its method of moving through the maze. Understanding how each ghost behaves is extremely important to be able to effectively avoid them.”
- Incredible Photos of Brutalist Architecture in the Former Yugoslavia From 1948-1980 - These photographs by Swiss photographer Valentin Jeck demonstrate that Soviet Bloc Brutalist architecture is the best kind of Brutalist architecture: ”The monumental concrete behemoths that characterize its style have been associated with faceless modernist excesses, the former Yugoslavia and decaying ex-Soviet republics, soulless, inhumane public housing… When executed with ingenuity and, often, a sense of humor, Brutalist architecture gave the world some of the most stunning modern buildings ever created.” This is the Monument to the uprising of the people of Kordun and Banija, now in Croatia.
Happy invoicing!
