Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DLXXXIX

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Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DLXXXIX

Bit late today. Somebody should have told me it's Monday

The Once-Classified Tale of Juanita Moody - ”On the brink of nuclear war, America’s bold response to the Soviet Union depended on an unknown spy agency operative whose story can at last be told.” Her work was crucial to the US government's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis
How a Carnivorous Mushroom Poisons Its Prey - ”Scientists have known for decades that oyster mushrooms feasted on roundworms—and they’ve finally figured out how their toxins work.” They'll be coming for us next
The Quest for a Floating Utopia - ”Can casting away from established society to inhabit sea-based colonies save us from the problems of modern life—or are we bound to repeat our mistakes?” I think our history makes it pretty clear we'll do the latter
18 Days, 5 Minutes - Volcanic Eruptions in Geldingadalir and Fagradalsfjall Iceland - Time-Lapse - ”This time-lapse video spans around 18 days in 5 minutes of the volcanic eruption in Geldingadalir and Fagradalsfjall on the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland. From 20.03.2021 GMT12:00 to the first 20 hours of the new fissures, 03.06.2021 GMT08:00.”
Meet the man working at the world's largest maternity hospital for polar bears - Life on Wrangel Island, Russia's northernmost nature reserve: ”Researcher Leonid Zaika spoke to The Siberian Times to share his experience of surviving a face to face meeting with a furious mother bear whose den he went to explore after wrongly calculating that it was empty, of seeing bears gathering under kitchen window because they like smell of milky porridge, of some predators that attack but others that ‘wag their tails’, and studying their maternity dens.”
What Is the Geometry of the Universe? - ”In our mind’s eye, the universe seems to go on forever. But using geometry we can explore a variety of three-dimensional shapes that offer alternatives to ‘ordinary’ infinite space.”
A Conspiracy Theorist’s Garden - Henry Wismayer meets a conspiracy theorist: ”A semi-detached house in a quiet, genteel road in one of the leafier environs of South London, amid rows of elegant Victorian semis, average sale price £1.8 million, the front gardens lustrous, the cars lining the pavement expensive and new… ‘Have you seen this photo? See the missing crest on the gate? It means the Queen’s a paedophile.’”
Magnum On Set: A Hard Day’s Night, David Hurn’s Portrait of Beatlemania - David Hurn: ”In 1964, I was asked by a friend – Dick Lester – who was about to direct the first Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, to photograph the film, not for press, but more from a sociological point of view… The Beatles couldn’t go anywhere. A couple of times they were in my car and the police would have to just wave us through a red light because they knew if the car stopped it’d be totally mobbed.”
Teardown of a logic chip from a vintage IBM ES/9000 mainframe - Ken Shirriff pulls a bit of a mainframe to bits, as is his wont: ”IBM pushed technology to the limit to create the ES/9000 in 1991, a family of powerful mainframes with a price tag to match, from $70,500 up to $22 million. The processor of the ES/9000 wasn't a single chip, but a metal and ceramic package called a Thermal Conduction Module (TCM) that held 121 chips… In this blog post, I examine the circuitry inside one of these logic chips from the ES/9000.”
I Illustrated National Parks In America Based On Their Worst Review And I Hope They Will Make You Laugh - Artwork by Amber Share: ”I'm an illustrator and I have always had a personal goal to draw all 62 US National Parks, but I wanted to find a unique twist for these poster designs. When I found that there are one-star reviews for every single park, the idea for Subpar Parks was born. For each park, I hand-letter a line from the one-star reviews alongside my illustration of each park as my way of putting fun and beautiful twist on the negativity.” Here’s one person’s opinion of Yosemite