I see somebody's tagged a bunch of unrelated threads with "monday links". Thanks for the support 
And for those of you who missed it in TPD, here’s norrahe’s recipe for black pudding, pork and apple burgers
Happy invoicing!
- The Exhilarating, Exasperating Life of the Harrier Jump Jet - "The Harrier is among the coolest, most ingenious aircraft ever designed, but… The first Harrier, the AV-8A, had a horrific safety record; more than half of the planes crashed.” HT to quackhandle for this look at the classic jump jet.
- The History of the URL: Domain, Protocol, and Port - Zack Bloom explains the history of those things that get you places on the Internet, which is really the history of the technology that makes up the Internet itself: ”On the 11th of January 1982 twenty two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email)… The problem was simple: there were 455 hosts on the ARPANET and the situation was getting out of control.”
- Discovery of Philistine Cemetery May Solve Biblical Mystery - "An unprecedented find in southern Israel may finally reveal the origins of one of the Hebrew Bible's greatest villains." Surprisingly little is known about the Philistines, other than that they didn’t know a lot about art, but they knew what they liked.
- Entropy Explained, With Sheep - "From Melting Ice Cubes to a Mystery About Time.” Brilliant interactive blog post by Aatish Bhatia explaining (with sheep) why the Universe is basically falling to bits.
- The Austen Family Music Books - Another great collection of historical significance at the Internet Archive: ”This collection consists of eighteen printed and manuscript music books owned by members of the Austen family, including the writer Jane Austen, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries… Although some volumes were compiled as early as the 1750s, the majority date from Jane Austen’s lifetime (1775-1817). Austen made or used several of the books, and she was probably familiar with music collected by other family members.”
- The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule - The Apollo 11 code has been available for a while but now it’s on GitHub: ”As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub… many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.”
- The fatal hike that became a Nazi propaganda coup - "In 1936, a school group from south London went on a hike in the Black Forest. Despite the heroic rescue attempts of German villagers, five boys died. Eighty years on, locals are still asking how it happened.” HT to ctdctd for this excellent example of the traditional British educational system at work.
- Robotic Stingrays Made with Rat Heart, Algae, and Plastic Fins - "Scientists have built a robotic stingray made of heart muscle cells from a rat, a skeleton of gold, plastic fins, and light-activated algae proteins—because, why not?" Why not, indeed.
- Galaxia: the Basics - Coordinates - Australian programmer dexy is working on a universe generator, and writing a lot of interesting stuff about it on his blog. Here, he explains how to nest coordinate systems to provide accuracy at scales larger than our universe and down to less than a millimetre on a planet, all within the constraints of current computing hardware: ”1 trillion kilometers might sound like a lot but it really is nothing on a galactic scale.”
- Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s - From the collection of Nick Jones, aka Existential Ennui: ”Presenting a permanent Existential Ennui gallery page of some of the most gorgeous British dustjackets ever to wrap around books in the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond, in some exceptional cases), especially crime and spy thrillers and science fiction. Most of these books are from my personal collection (except where otherwise stated), and to my mind each of these dustjackets evinces a very particular, instantly recognizable approach to British wrapper design during that glorious '50s/'60s era.”
And for those of you who missed it in TPD, here’s norrahe’s recipe for black pudding, pork and apple burgers
Happy invoicing!
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