A podcast! a collapsing tower! and a good fort.

• First: Mike Bell analyses the collapse of a church tower in Connecticut. This is a really interesting bit of analysis, including tracking down original high-quality CCTV files, detailed modelling and analysis of the building, and conclusions that seem to hold up, at least from my uninformed perspective. (Thanks to Louis for the suggestion.)
   
• Phil Edwards has a fascinating deep-dive into Earthrise, the famous photo of the whole Earth from lunar orbit — and after the passing of the photographer, astronaut William Anders this week, aged 91, it seems like the right time to share it. (Thanks Jackie for sending this over.)
   
• Corridor's new short film Graymatter (strong language, horror themes) is both a tour-de-force technology demo and a solid bit of filmmaking. The behind-the-scenes reveals how the key shot is done: possibly the first serious narrative attempt at using the new technique of "gaussian splats". Also worth mentioning: the carefully-rotated opening shots, and the spectacular gear-up shot that's either using a robot arm or a 360° camera. Or both.
   
• And I have no idea why no-one's taken a slow-motion camera to the Gloucestershire cheese rolling before: but the Slow Mo Guys are absolutely the right people to do it. It's worth watching both the warm-up conversation, and the brilliantly-edited final footage.
   

• I've linked to brr.fyi before: it's the blog of someone who worked as an IT technician in Antarctica. There's a lot of fascinating stuff all over the blog, but the recent post about engineering for slow internet is well worth reading for anyone who's working on web or app stuff! (Thanks to Nolan for sending this over.)
   
• Do you want to own a sea fort? If you have a million pounds spare (plus taxes) then two forts off the southern coast of England are now on the market, after some optimistic people found out that "trapped on a concrete structure in the middle of the Solent" is not synonymous with "luxury vacation". And if you can't afford it, don't worry: it's the fort that counts.
   
• Bizarre Google blog announcement: they have a "Shipping Network Design API", and operators of container ships can use it to optimise their trade routes?! This feels like a very old-school Google project, by which I mean a group of engineers put it together as an interesting side project, a very small number of people will come to totally rely on it, and Google will shut it down without warning in a few years' time when those engineers have moved on.
   
• There's a campaign to save British phone boxes. Not the classic red ones: but the few remaining "ugly" 1980s boxes. And I agree! Yes, they're clunky, yes, they weren't liked as much: but they're the boxes I grew up with, and putting three significant ones on the heritage list seems like a reasonable balance between practicality and history.
   
• Turns out China's tallest uninterrupted waterfall gets a little help in the dry season: a hiker found a pipe keeping the cascade going.
   

And finally: we DO NOT talk about the orangutan. (strong language; thanks Linus for the link.)

All the best,

— Tom