Back from the cold, damp seaside? Here's a bunch of stuff to waste the rest of your day:
Happy invoicing!
- Ian's Shoelace Site - "Fun, fashion & science in the Internet's #1 website about shoelaces. Whether you want to learn to lace shoes, tie shoelaces, stop shoelaces from coming undone, calculate shoelace lengths or even repair aglets, Ian's Shoelace Site has the answer!" It's about shoelaces
- “I Would Only Rob Banks for My Family” - The family that robs banks together, stays together: "Scott knew that if he had a bigger operation—“a team of accomplices” was the way he put it to me—he could get cash from several tellers’ drawers and perhaps even get to the bank’s vault. The problem was that he had no criminal friends to turn to. There was no one he could trust to stay quiet about what he was doing—except for his own children."
- An Interactive Guide To The Fourier Transform - "The Fourier Transform is one of deepest insights ever made. Unfortunately, the meaning is buried within dense equations... Rather than deciphering it symbol-by-symbol, let's experience the idea."
- “Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry” - Entrepreneurs are coming for your washing: "In urban centers like New York and Chicago, many places offer delivery already. But: “The laundry and dry-cleaning industry, it’s all, like, old people,” says Dulanto in the nose-wrinkling manner of someone for whom aging is still an abstract concept. “They’re not tech savvy, and they still put up those really ugly stickers with that ’90s clip art.”"
- The Strange World of Library Music - "The dusty field of library music—background tracks owned by labels and lent out to TV, radio, and film projects—has proven to be an endless sample source for hip-hop producers as well as inspiration for avant-garde experimentalists."
- Why Chess Will Destroy Your Mind - In 1859, Scientific American was unimpressed with chess: "Napoleon the Great, who had a great passion for playing chess, was often beaten by a rough grocer in St. Helena. Neither Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, nor any of the great ones of the earth, acquired proficiency in chess-playing."
- The Last Words of Tupac Shakur - Las Vegas Sergeant Chris Carroll was the first police officer on the scene when the rapper was shot: "I still don’t know who the shooter is, and as soon as they stopped, almost all the car doors go flying open. So I pulled out my gun, and there’s maybe 10 people. And it was apparent immediately after they got out of the cars that this wasn’t Joe Citizen driving with his wife; these were hard-ass guys... So I’m pointing my gun, and I’m yelling at guys to get down on the ground. Some of them do, and some of them don’t. Some of them were kinda thinking about it, and they’re looking at each other, almost like, ‘Do we run? Do we do like he says and get on the ground?’"
- The Evolution of Klingon Foreheads - Everything you could ever want to know on the subject: "While the principal difference between flat and ridged Klingon foreheads is already legendary, there is a certain degree of variation among the ridged Klingons too. Their basic make-up was modified more than once in the course of the six TOS movies. Notably most Klingons who appeared in "Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country" had less pronounced forehead bones than most Klingons in the other movies. Star Trek settled to a final Klingon forehead style as we know it from DS9, VOY and ENT in later seasons of TNG. Until then even the very same character of Worf was subjected to a metamorphosis. And even the flat TOS Klingons do not look all the same. This commented gallery shows nearly all Klingon make-up variations that ever appeared."
- Radioactive kitty litter may have ruined our best hope to store nuclear waste - "Some of the most dangerous nuclear waste in the US is currently scattered between 77 locations all over the country, awaiting permanent storage. Until February, many experts suggested that the best place to put it was a facility about 40 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP)... But earlier this year two emergencies brought that suggestion — and WIPP’s future — into question." And all because somebody bought the wrong brand of cat litter
- Book Traces - "Thousands of old library books bear fascinating traces of the past. Readers wrote in their books, and left notes, pictures, letters, flowers, locks of hair, and other things between their pages. We need your help identifying them because many are in danger of being discarded as libraries go digital." Here, for example, is a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, given to Beatrix Potter the day after her 10th birthday:
Happy invoicing!
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