Another week with no pubs or haircuts here, but at least the Internet is still on
Happy invoicing!
- Kitchen Rhythm: A Year in a Parisian Pâtisserie - ”An Oxford grad learns to navigate boiling sugar, sleep deprivation, and exacting pastry chefs with whom she can barely communicate.” Frances Leech on the hectic business of making cakes.
- Scientists unlocked the secret of how these ultrablack fish absorb light - ”In the darkest depths of the ocean, where little to no light from the surface penetrates, unusual creatures thrive, many of whom create their own light via bioluminescence to hunt for prey, among other uses. But several species of fish have evolved the opposite survival strategy: they are ultrablack, absorbing nearly all light that strikes their skin.” HT to ladymuck for this account of a study of these fish whose skin is among the blackest materials yet found; the full paper is available as a PDF.
- The Winnebago Heli-Home Was a Real Flying RV That Needs to Make a Comeback in 2020 - In the 1970s, Winnebago sold converted Siksorky S-55 helicopters as the ultimate in mobile homes: ”In addition to the standard landing gear, the Heli-Home could be obtained with optional floats. That meant you could forget the trouble of having to find a narrow clearing in the woods to land. You could just set right down on a lake and drop anchor. I'm not sure how much time I would want to spend with five other people inside a cramped helicopter that's anchored in the middle of a lake, but then again I've never tried it.”
- Animals Use Social Distancing to Avoid Disease - If it's good enough for lobsters, it should be good enough for you: ”Lobsters usually share these rocky crevices, and tonight a new one has wandered in. Something about the newcomer is not right, though. Chemicals in its urine smell different. These substances are produced when a lobster is infected with a contagious virus… The healthy returning lobster seems alarmed. As hard as it is to find a den like this one, protected from predators, the young animal backs out, into open waters and away from the deadly virus.”
- WindowSwap - A simple but ingenious idea: have a look through other people's window, streamed from random places in the world. And why not set up a webcam and stream yours too
- Blast sends star hurtling across the Milky Way - ”An exploding white dwarf star blasted itself out of its orbit with another star in a ‘partial supernova’ and is now hurtling across our galaxy, according to a new study from the University of Warwick.” Tom Frew on the recent discovery of an unusual white dwarf.
- Private landowners and homemade signs - Bryn K Buck is a traffic sign designer. Here, he casts his expert eye over the rubbish signage often found in private-but-public areas like service stations and supermarket car parks: ”Blue and red circles have distinct meanings; mixing these up in order to promote a corporate identity is a terrible idea. ‘You MUST NOT Give Way’ is the unintended message here.” Lots of other interesting stuff about road signs on his site too
- Puzzling ‘Planet Nine’ May Be a Grapefruit-Sized Black Hole - ”Scientists at Harvard University and the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) have developed a new method for detecting black holes, which may end up pegging our solar system’s ‘Planet Nine’ as one of the light-swallowing monsters. The scientists also say that if the mysterious planet is determined to be a black hole, it’s most likely a “primordial” one that’s only the size of a grapefruit.” I still say Pluto is Planet Nine and this thing will have to accept tenth place, should it be found :rolleyes
- The Intel 8086 processor's registers: from chip to transistors - Ken Shirriff continues his exploration of the 8086 with a look at the register file: ”Registers take up a significant portion of the die, even though they are just 36 bytes in total. Due to space limitations, early microprocessors had a relatively small number of registers; in comparison, a modern processor chip has kilobytes of registers and megabytes of cache storage.”
- Photographer Updates Postcards Of 1960s Resorts Into Their Abandoned Ruins - Pablo Iglesias Maurer revisits old resorts to take photographs from the same place as old promotional snaps: ”The matchbook no longer lines up with reality. I look down through the viewfinder of my camera and up again at the matchbook, aligning the two images the best I can. Up (snap) down (snap). It feels like I’m seeing this place in some sort of dystopian View-Master, each image on the wheel darker than the next.” This is “Swim n’ Sun Indoor Swimming Pool at Penn Hills Lodge and Cottages. The Poconos’ Finest Modern Resort.”
Happy invoicing!
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