I climb inside a robot. Plus, bird news!

• Every Christmas, someone plays a brief concert using the old factory whistle in York, Pennsylvania. This is his story. (Thanks to Aaron for sending this over!)
   
• A History of the World According to Getty Images is incredible work. (If downloading a 14.7Gb ProRes file is a bit much, there's a copy on Vimeo here.) Getty Images charges for access to historically important video that's in the public domain, and this is an end run around that restriction. It's both art, and a very useful piece of public service.
   
• BIRD NEWS: Bird migration on merchant ships is pleasant, calm footage of migrating birds taking a rest on merchant boats. "Ship-assisted migration" is apparently a big deal, according to this article, which includes a link to this footage of a whole murmuration of starlings resting on a North Sea fishing boat.
   
• Ann Reardon, of How To Cook That, breaks down how big companies ruined chocolate with both thorough research and thorough testing.
   
• From the recommendations on that video, I also found B. Dylan Hollis trying to research, and recreate, a mysterious dessert from 1909.
   
• And There I Ruined It makes a song entirely from artists singing "yeah". It's surprisingly catchy, and there's a bonus round at the end.

• Flight attendants want to ban lap-babies on planes. This is something I'd never considered: in an accident, young children who aren't in proper restraint seats are likely to come to severe harm. But if you charge for a ticket and require a proper seat, they're more likely to be taken by car instead... which means they're at a significantly greater risk of accident. It's counterintuitive, but there's a solid argument that not requiring proper restraints saves lives.
   
• The drama of trying to convert election PDFs to spreadsheets. One engineer's story of how coding, crowdsourcing, and social media can help, and harm, elections.
   
• JPMorgan thought it had 54 tonnes of nickel worth $1.3m. It actually had 54 tonnes of rocks.
   
• Related: in the 1970s, there was a bizarre fad for "pet rocks", which were just rocks packaged to look like you were buying a pet hamster or gerbil. The official "care and training of your pet rock" manual has been put on the Internet Archive, and it proves that over-commitment to the bit (particularly where there's money involved) is not a new thing.

And finally, in MORE BIRD NEWS: a lyrebird has been caught mimicking a zoo's "evacuate now" siren.

Huh, that's a lot of links this week and not much context. I should probably get out more!
 

All the best,

— Tom