Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCXX

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Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCCXX

My Monday has started with a cold; maybe this selection of fine reading matter will help ensure yours is a little more enjoyable

‘The forest had gone’: the storm that moved a mountain - Extreme weather in the Alps: ”On a small ledge in the Swiss mountains, 200 people were enjoying a summer football tournament. As night fell, they had no idea what was coming.”
A Single, ‘Naked’ Black Hole Rewrites the History of the Universe - ”The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos.” There's a lot of good stuff coming from the JWST
Most Earth-Like Planet Yet May Have Been Found Just 40 Light-Years Away - Home away from home? I told you there was good stuff coming from the JWST: ”In exciting new JWST observations, the Earth-sized exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e shows hints of a gaseous envelope similar to our own, one that could facilitate liquid water on the surface.”
A Bi-Directional Plasma Thruster Could Deorbit Space Junk Safely - Bringing down the trash: ”A new paper from Kazunori Takahashi of Tohoku University in Japan looks at a novel solution that uses a type of magnetic field typically seen in fusion reactors to decelerate debris using a plasma beam while balancing itself with an equal and opposite thrust on the other side.” The full paper is Cusp-type bi-directional radiofrequency plasma thruster toward contactless active space debris removal
Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating elder care - Can robots look after us when we're old? (Probably not.) ”Devices such as Robear, which was developed in Japan in 2015, have yet to be normalized in care facilities or private homes. Why haven’t they taken off? The answer tells us something about the limitations of techno-solutionism and the urgent need to rethink our approach to care.”
Unzoomed - A simple but enjoyable game: ”Find the city you are looking at from above.”
A Glorious Reunion: The Return of the Florentine Public Collection - ”The artistic treasures of the Tuscan city of Florence were a prize to be won by Adolf Hitler, who long admired the city’s cultural splendor… Collections were hidden, discovered by the Germans, sorted, split apart, and constantly on the move, leaving a complicated puzzle for MFAA officers, aka the Monuments Men, to piece back together.” The story of how many looted treasures were returned.
Browse Thousands of Free Vintage Cocktail Recipes Online (1705–1951) - The Exposition Universelle des Vins et Spiritueux has an online collection of books of cocktail recipes spanning centuries: ”An initiative of the Museum of Wine and Spirits on the Ile de Bendor in Southeastern France, the collection is a boon to anyone with an interest in cocktail culture …ditto design, illustration, evolving social mores…”
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape - Bogdan Ionescu puts a vape to work: ”Last year, I was tearing apart some of these fancier pacifiers for adults when I noticed something that caught my eye, instead of the expected black blob of goo hiding some ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) I see a little integrated circuit inscribed “PUYA”. I don’t blame you if this name doesn’t excite you as much it does me, most people have never heard of them… I was pretty sure it was a PY32F002A, but after poking around with pyOCD, I noticed that the flash was 24k and we have 3k of RAM. The extra flash meant that it was more likely a PY32F002B, which is actually a very different chip.”
Chopstick Sleeves as Emissaries of Japanese Typography and Culture - ”Paper chopstick sleeves emerged at the turn of the 20th century when disposable chopsticks and packaged meals gained popularity with the advent of train travel… The latest addition to the Archive’s holdings of Asian ephemera is the hashibukuro collection of Mr. Susumu Kitagawa of Fuji City, Japan. While individually modest in their design and messaging, when considered as a whole the sleeves that comprise this collection map a singular history of Japanese ideology and aesthetics.” This one is from the Sapporo Station Standing Sales Company