Spring is here! 
And if you like the vintage Irish book covers, why not continue the theme at dinner time with norrahe’s recipe for traditional Potato cakes
Happy invoicing!
- The Cambridge Meccano Differential Analyser No. 2 - HT to Zeity for this excellent bit of computing history: ”It initially had four integrators, a fifth integrator being added by Maurice Wilkes in 1937. During the war years it was co-opted for military use, and various improvements were made to it at this time under the direction of Dr. J Crank.” There’s loads of other interesting stuff on that site, home of the Computer Conservation Society
- Consider the Merkin: A Brief History of Pubic Wigs in Hollywood - "Attempting to confirm a cinematic merkin has to rank among the most delicate tasks of reportage… We’re hip to the Elton John–esque realness of Kate Winslet in The Reader, Heidi Klum in Blow Dry, and Evan Rachel Wood in Mildred Pierce, as they have been candid in discussing cooch toupees. And pubic wigs aren’t just for the ladies, as Jake Gyllenhaal proved in his up-close-and-personal Love & Other Drugs sex scenes.” SFW, you’ll be pleased to hear.
- The Master of the Murder Castle - From Harper’s Magazine, a 1943 account of the career of serial killer H. H. Holmes: ”If ever a house was haunted, that one on Chicago’s South Side should have been. To this day, fifty years later, nobody knows precisely how many persons were murdered in it… Their bodies were destroyed in cellar pits containing quicklime and acids. Some of their skeletons were sold by their efficient murderer, who was determined to realize every penny of profit from his crimes.”
- What Does Your Reaction to a Robotic Trash Can Say About You? - "Imagine you’re in a cafeteria, finishing up a bag of chips and chatting with some friends. You’re beginning to think about getting up to throw away your wrapper, when—suddenly—the nearest trash barrel approaches you instead. It rolls back and forth, and wiggles briefly. It is, it seems, at your service." The future is here, and it wants your rubbish
- A Song-by-Song Look at What Made George Martin the Fifth Beatle - "As the Beatles’ producer, George Martin’s contributions to their music are well known. But he also played an instrument on nearly a fifth of their recorded songs, and wrote the arrangements for many of their greatest. Below, a catalogue of Mr. Martin’s major contributions as the fifth Beatle."
- Sagnagrunnur - "A geographically mapped database of Icelandic folk legends.” The Icelandic take their folklore very seriously (belief in elves is reportedly widespread among the population), and this interactive map allows you to locate the habitations of various legendary beings.
- Everybody Freeze! - Turns out many Silicon Valley libertarians believe in freezing heads at death, and they’re rubbish at it: ”Suozzi’s bodily fluids were flushed and replaced with a specially formulated and questionably effective “cryoprotectant”—antifreeze. The official recap alludes to a certain amount of rubbernecking and bickering consistent with past insider accounts of Alcor operations. That wasn’t all. “Unfortunately,” the Cryonics report notes, “there was some confusion and disagreement regarding the ideal temperature at which to perform surgery.” One might assume a forty-four-year-old organization devoted to storing body parts on ice would have reached some working consensus on this question by now.”
- Scientist and Mob Idol - I and Scientist and Mob Idol - II - From 1933, a classic New Yorker profile of Albert Einstein: ”When he first became famous, Einstein was a strange compound of cosmic wisdom and worldly inexperience… Einstein knew things that everybody else was ignorant of, and was ignorant of things that everybody else knew. The name of the richest man in the world meant nothing to him. He used a $1,500 check from the Rockefeller Foundation as a bookmark, lost the book, and could not remember who had sent the check.” (BTW, “mob” clearly wasn’t a term primarily meaning “criminal organisation” back then.)
- Engineering the future of fusion - Cheap energy! Coming soon? Soonish? In a bit? ”Fusion power is no longer a physics problem, but an engineering one. Controlled nuclear fusion has been achievable since 1951… However, transforming a laboratory experiment into an industrial process is difficult at the best of times. This is especially true when you’re essentially extracting energy from an artificial sun.”
- Vintage Irish Book Covers - Great, and growing, collection maintained by Dublin graphic designer Niall McCormack, ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s.
And if you like the vintage Irish book covers, why not continue the theme at dinner time with norrahe’s recipe for traditional Potato cakes
Happy invoicing!
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