- The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe - ”Ken Eto left the meeting at Caesar DiVarco’s club on Wabash knowing they were going to kill him. It was midday… He had to figure out what to do, or what he could do. Around 3 p.m., he got back home to Bolingbrook. The thing was the life insurance. Mary Lou needed to know where the $100,000 policy was.” The story of a Japanese American in the Chicago underworld
- Physicists Create Elusive Particles That Remember Their Pasts - ”Forty years ago, Frank Wilczek was mulling over a bizarre type of particle that could live only in a flat universe. Had he put pen to paper and done the calculations, Wilczek would have found that these then-theoretical particles held an otherworldly memory of their past… Physicists working with the company Quantinuum announced today that they had used the company’s newly unveiled, next-generation H2 processor to synthesize and manipulate non-abelian anyons in a novel phase of quantum matter.” More quantum weirdness
- Nth Country Experiment - ”Could any country with the right knowledge and technology build a nuclear bomb? From May 1964 to April 1967, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (the predecessor to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) set out to answer this question. The Laboratory hired three physicists who only recently received their Ph.Ds in physics to design a nuclear bomb.” I've heard various versions of this story over the years, but this seems to be the definitive account
- Radioactive Limehouse – The Strange Story of the British Radium Corporation - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this bit of nuclear history from closer to home: ”The Isle of Dogs and nearby Limehouse has been the site of a wide variety of industries over the last few hundred year, However I have recently came across some newspaper articles that illustrate that Limehouse played a major part in the processing of Radium.”
- 74 Seconds: Engine Failure to Crash! - In which Ryan makes a forced landing: ”I'm putting the word #Crash in here for the hashtag / search term, but he really did an amazing job under very difficult circumstances.”
- How to Survive a Car Crash in 10 Easy Steps - ”A journalist navigates a world forever changed by her traumatic brain injury.” Anne Lagamayo reminds us that you don't have to fly a plane to come a cropper. Probably best not to go anywhere at all
- Hearst Metrotone News Collection - A huge archive of newsreels: ”In 1981, the Hearst Corporation donated its newsreel collection to the University of California… Begin browsing the newsreels shown in theatres from 1929 to 1967. If the story title is displayed in red, you can click on the title to play the video.”
- The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History - ”In the words of the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope, to err is human. But most of us regular humans make mistakes on pretty small scales, like leaving our house keys at work or forgetting to order fries in the drive-through. When rock stars screw up, they do it in epic, spectacular ways, with consequences that are often catastrophic.”
- The Group Decode ROM: The 8086 processor's first step of instruction decoding - Ken Shirriff continues delving into the 8086: ”A key component of any processor is instruction decoding: analyzing a numeric opcode and figuring out what actions need to be taken… The first step in decoding an 8086 instruction is something called the Group Decode ROM, which categorizes instructions into about 35 types that control how the instruction is decoded and executed. For instance, the Group Decode ROM determines if an instruction is executed in hardware or in microcode. It also indicates how the instruction is structured: if the instruction has a bit specifying a byte or word operation, if the instruction has a byte that specifies the addressing mode, and so forth.”
- The Chocolate Wrappers Museum - Martin Mihál's website is just what it says it is: ”I hope content of my site can help not only to chocolate collectors but also anybody who loves chocolate! I wish that browsing my site may inspire some visitors to start their own collection of chocolate wrappers.” This is from Kharkiv, Ukraine, circa 1987
Happy invoicing!
