Some light reading to pass the time while you wait for Kim Jong-un to administer a slow-acting poison to Trump, which is obviously the only reason he agreed to a one-to-one meeting in the first place
Happy invoicing!
- Barbearians at the Gate - What to do when you don’t believe in government but bears come to town? ”In the summer of 2017, the survivalists began to worry—really worry—about the bears… I visited Grafton several times over two years to determine if, to poach Timmins’s words, ‘anything out of the ordinary’ was happening there. When it came to bears, where did truth end and myth begin? What I found was more revealing than I expected: a parable of liberty, disinformation, and fear. A parable, really, of America."
- Why Earth’s Cracked Crust May Be Essential for Life - "Life needs more than water alone. Recent discoveries suggest that plate tectonics has played a critical role in nourishing life on Earth. The findings carry major consequences for the search for life elsewhere in the universe."
- Book Cover Concentration - "Below is a grid containing 2 editions of 6 different books. Your challenge : match the pairs of books from the cover art alone." Fun little game for bibliophiles. It gets a little easier if you’ve spent a lot of time over the years browsing secondhand paperbacks
- Bacteria Survive in NASA’s Clean Rooms by Eating Cleaning Products - "Few places are as hard for microbes to infiltrate as the clean rooms in which NASA assembles its spacecraft." Nevertheless, they persist
- The Color Photographers of World War I - Colour photography wasn’t common a hundred years ago, but it did exist: ”A few vanguard photographers were, in fact, working in color during the Great War. And these rare color photographs show the war in a different — and in many ways, more relatable — light.”
- Somewhere Under My Left Ribs: A Nurse’s Story - Christie Watson on her experiences as a nurse in operating theatres: "I try not to think of what can happen in theater, of all that can — and has — gone wrong. I adopt my relaxed-on-the-outside, panicking-on-the-inside pose… I am waiting, with my teeth pressed together, for the awful moment between a child being anaesthetized and a parent having to kiss them goodbye and leave them in the hands of strangers.”
- Back to the Future of Handwriting Recognition - "Fifty years ago, RAND corporation developed the Graphical Input Language software system (GRAIL)… When the user wanted a box on the screen, they drew the box. When the user wanted text on the screen, they handprinted the text. When you watch a demo of the system today, it still feels elegant and magical. To steal a line from Tony Hoare, GRAIL is in many ways an improvement on nearly all of its successors.” Jack Schaedler’s exploration of how the system works includes a number of interactive elements allowing you to draw stuff, then play around with the parameters used to decipher your scrawl
- Raising the Dead - "At the bottom of the biggest underwater cave in the world, diving deeper than almost anyone had ever gone, Dave Shaw found the body of a young man who had disappeared ten years earlier." Shaw was determined to return and recover Deon Dreyer’s body, whatever the risk.
- Hunks Punch Lunks: The Fascist Sex Cult Of The Professionals - Taylor Parkes revisits the 1970s TV show: ”The Professionals is not art, but neither is it purely kitsch. Rather, it's that most hypnotic and strangely rewarding of phenomena, the good-bad TV show. Aesthetically atrocious, morally questionable, ludicrous from top to bottom... and yet so hugely entertaining on its own terms, you can't look away.”
- Valley of the Ragdolls - Ragdoll cats are not like other cats: ”What makes the Ragdoll cat different from other cats is a matter of temperament. Stripped of a desire for hunting, the Ragdoll has a languid, friendly personality. It is large and less agile than other cats, and has a regal feline elegance… This is a cat that greets you at the door and follows you from room to room, providing something like unconditional love.”
Happy invoicing!
Comment