Warm, sunny weather on a Bank Holiday Monday? Someone has blundered 
Bonus linky: on Saturday I attended the eighth Boring Conference in London. Just to make you all jealous, here’s Diamond Geezer’s notes on the event
Happy invoicing!
- Murder at the Alcatraz of the Rockies - "ADX Florence, nicknamed the Alcatraz of the Rockies, is where the government locks up the serial killers, terrorists, and drug kingpins considered too dangerous to keep anywhere else… Maybe, improbably, a murder conspiracy had played out in the most secure facility in America. For the better part of the next decade, a rookie FBI agent would try to prove that it had." The long and complex investigation into the killing of gangster Manuel Torrez by the Mexican Mafia.
- I Went to the ER with a Live Roach in My Ear and It Was as Horrifying as You Think - "Last month, in the middle of the night, I woke up startled. It felt like someone had placed a chip of ice in my left earhole—but it was something way worse… In that moment, my husband was my only hope. He grabbed a pair of tweezers, located the thickest part of the roach that was visible (I KNOW) and tried to very delicately extract it… Unfortunately, he only managed to pull two of its spiky legs off. At that point, it was clear I needed to go to the ER." Katie Holley recounts a hideous experience
- A Radically Conservative Solution for Cosmology’s Biggest Mystery - "Two ways of measuring the universe’s expansion rate yield two conflicting answers. Many point to the possibility of new physics at work, but a new analysis argues that unseen errors could be to blame."
- Call Apogee and Say Aardwolf - Joe Siegler on an Easter egg in Wolfenstein 3D: "It was decided during the development of the game that they would give away a prize that would be well hidden inside the registered version of the game. To that, they hid the sign that said ‘Call Apogee and Say Aardwolf’ inside a stupidly complicated maze… The game was released, but the contest was (internally) canceled. The Aardwolf sign remained in the game’s data files, however. Which caused us in tech support much consternation, because people would constantly call up and ask us that."
- 7 Giant Machines That Changed the World—And 1 That Might - "From a 17-mile-long particle accelerator to a football-field–sized space observatory, here are seven massive machines that have made an equally huge impact on how we build, how we observe our universe, and how we lift rockets into space. We've also included a bonus machine: a technological marvel-to-be that may be just as influential once it's completed."
- Bypassing code protection on an Intel 8752 - Sneaking data out of EPROMs from 1985: ”The security bits that enforce code protection on the Intel 8752 can be cleared with UV, while keeping the main program memory mostly intact by applying a UV mask (nail polish) to the EPROM regions of the die.”
- The World’s Oldest Papyrus and What It Can Tell Us About the Great Pyramids - "Following notes written by an English traveler in the early 19th century and two French pilots in the 1950s, Pierre Tallet made a stunning discovery: a set of 30 caves honeycombed into limestone hills but sealed up and hidden from view in a remote part of the Egyptian desert, a few miles inland from the Red Sea, far from any city, ancient or modern… in 2013, during his third digging season, he came upon something quite unexpected: entire rolls of papyrus, some a few feet long and still relatively intact, written in hieroglyphics as well as hieratic, the cursive script the ancient Egyptians used for everyday communication. Tallet realized that he was dealing with the oldest known papyri in the world.” And among the contents is the only known account of how the Great Pyramid was built, by one of the people who worked on it.
- With Parasites, Nothing is Sacred: Study Finds Lungworms Alter How Their Host Toads Poop - ”Scientists recently discovered lungworms alter the behavior of their cane toad hosts to ensure things are most comfortable for them. But what is surprising, or at least a little unnerving, is what they actually do: the worms makes their hosts poop differently."
- Confessions of a Highways England patrolman - HT to northernladuk for this one, which is presented in an annoying slideshow format for no good reason, but which is worth clicking through if you’ve ever wondered what those people in hi-vis jackets hanging around broken-down cars do with the rest of their day, and why they won’t change your tyre: ”We are not allowed to assist… If someone physically can't change a wheel, I will stay with them and let them sit in their vehicle in the warm and dry, I'll put a hard shoulder closure on and stand in the rain monitoring the traffic until recovery arrives… To be honest, if I could change them, I would. The powers that be have removed all tools from our vehicles to stop us from doing it. We're not even allowed to change our own tyres!”
- The Long Goodbye: The 49 Best Covers from Around the World - "Simply saying Raymond Chandler’s name summons up a world: a slant of light, a wry grin, the sting of gin and lime, a melancholy something in the air. Few authors can match him for evocative intensity… Here are 47 of the best covers of The Long Goodbye from around the world.“
Bonus linky: on Saturday I attended the eighth Boring Conference in London. Just to make you all jealous, here’s Diamond Geezer’s notes on the event
Happy invoicing!
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