- ‘The more we pulled back the carpet, the more we saw’: what I learned when I bought a house with a dark past - ”I knew the place I’d just moved into wasn’t my dream home. What I didn’t know was that its history would give me nightmares …” I think I'll leave the carpet down in my new place for now
- How Roman roads 'still have an effect on our world today' - HT to Doctor Strangelove for this story suggesting Roman roads make you rich: ”The roads, which were constructed to transport troops to the outer edges of the Roman empire, correlate strongly to prosperity today, researchers have found.” The original paper referred to there appears to be this one from 2018: Roman Roads to Prosperity: Persistence and Non-Persistence of Public Goods Provision. Typical of my luck that I find this out as I'm about to move away from the Fosse Way, which I've lived on for eighteen years
- How many yottabytes in a quettabyte? Extreme numbers get new names - ”By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 1024 bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. Now, the booming growth of the data sphere has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes beyond that magnitude, to describe the outrageously big and small.” I remember when you needed to be Microsoft to provision a mere terabyte of storage, circa 1999
- The Names of All Manner of Hounds: a Unique Inventory in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript - I don't usually link directly to PDFs hosted on Google Drive, but I think it's necessary to make an exception for this: ”The Names of All Manner of Hounds is a unique list of 1065 names for hunting dogs (running hounds, terriers and greyhounds) found in a fifteenth-century manuscript that has recently been sold into a closed private collection. The present article offers a critical edition of this unusual text, which has never been published before… I proceed to describe the codex in which the list is found, then discuss some of its salient features, including patterns in the names and some notable linguistic features among them. The article closes with a critical edition of the list of names together with a brief but comprehensive apparatus criticus.”
- Secret Tourism: Travelling with Europe’s Nomadic Shepherds - An idea for your next year's holiday: ”It will probably sound out of character if we told you that to discover Europe’s most secret corners, you should follow the herd and keep to the beaten path, quite literally. But hear us out and grab your hiking boots because today we’re taking notes from a very small group of folks who actually plan their holidays around the dates of bi-annual animal migrations, following one of Europe’s oldest traditions through mountains and pastures… This seasonal droving of livestock along migratory routes is mainly found in remote parts of France, Italy, Spain, Greece, and the Tyrol region of Austria.”
- Spoofing LIDAR Could Blind Autonomous Vehicles To Obstacles - HT to vetran for this one: ”While humans are pretty wily and difficult to fool, our robot driving friends are less robust. Some researchers are concerned that LiDAR sensors could be spoofed, hiding obstacles and tricking driverless cars into crashes, or worse.” Mr. Musk, your lawsuit is here
- Ontario photographer captures massive wave that looks like 'the perfect face' - ”Of the roughly 10,000 photographs Ingersoll, Ont., resident Cody Evans took of Lake Erie last Saturday during the lake-effect storm, one looked like something conjured up by Poseidon.” Cool picture, but who realised how bad storms on the Great Lakes can get?
- M&S knitwear, dungarees and the death of the tie: Newsroom dress codes in 2022 - From the UK Press Gazette, an investigation into the change in newsroom dress codes, accelerated by the pandemic: ”Before 2020, suits and business attire were the norm for men and women across many newsrooms. In 2022, few British newsrooms compel their staff to dress formally – and many journalists now view ties and high heels as relics of the past in the workplace.” Although this is about journalism, I reckon it's a good proxy for the majority of workplaces post-lockdown
- A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die's silicon - Ken Shirriff uncovers a patch in the 8086: ”While reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos, a particular circuit caught my eye because its physical layout on the die didn't match the surrounding circuitry. This circuit turns out to implement special functionality for a couple of instructions, subtlely changing the way they interacted with interrupts. Some web searching revealed that this behavior was changed by Intel in 1978 to fix a problem with early versions of the 8086 chip. By studying the die, we can get an idea of how Intel dealt with bugs in the 8086 microprocessor.”
- Fantasy Jodorowsky Tron visualisations by Johnny Darrell - ”There seems to be a current trend in AI circles of mashing up film genres or visualising existent films either within different time periods or with different directors. Johnny Darrell has imagined both Tron films as visualised and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky using the AI app Midjourney. These are all created by the AI app via prompts with only the typography on the posters being added later via Photoshop.” If you're not familiar with Jodorowsky's work, it is apparently "filled with violently surreal images and a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation", and John Lennon liked it enough to finance his film The Holy Mountain.
Happy invoicing!
