“Since its creation, the coin had possessed a curious quality, a weight greater than its mass, and a worth beyond its face value. It had a way of changing lives.” Alexander Huls tells the tale of the big coin heist in Hazlitt.
“‘There’s a worldwide inventory of disks that were manufactured 10 or 20 or 30 years ago,’ Persky says. ‘That inventory is fixed. We’re just blowing through it day by day.'” Wired’s Jacopo Prisco looks at the persistence of the floppy disk.
“It’s pretty nice out there. It’s quiet, the view is spectacular. The storms are incredible, but you have to consider, you know, we’ve maintained a light station there since 1832. So they really got it down pat.” Grand Manan’s Ken Ingersoll talks to the CBC about landing one of the few remaining lighthouse keeper jobs.
“He could not worldbuild his way into a workable story; he had to muddle and discover and revise, just like the rest of us.” Robin Sloan reads Christopher Tolkein’s History of the Lord of the Rings and realizes just how much of the magic of J.R.R. Tolkein’s books arose from the revision.
“We’re losing a Hubble-telescope-type capability that we had for five decades.” An ocean-drilling ship that’s driven landmark research will be retired next year, Nature reports.