Hello, and welcome again to Kat’s Kable. With no further ado, here’s this week’s list.

1. Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria - “Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.” Read this. Google attempted to catalogue all the books ever and digitise them, but ran into legal issues because nobody else was allowed to do the same and they filed lawsuits claiming unfair play. Now this database of books exists, but nobody can access it at all. I hope this sorts itself out.
   
2. The Lives and Lies of a Professional Imposter - Jeremy Wilson is a very smart man, but uses it to con people out of money, cars, and more. An interesting investigation.
   
   Still, his identity was a puzzle. He had spent 25 years stealing Social Security numbers and fabricating new aliases, leaving behind a thicket of confusing and falsified records. Six weeks earlier, he had been released from a federal prison in New Hampshire, where he had served six years for identity theft as Jeremy Clark-Erskine. But he had more than 27 aliases in five states. His birth certificate had been altered several times. Even his citizenship was in doubt. He had been deported more than once as an illegal immigrant. Now he is at Rikers Island, awaiting trial.
   
3. How to Save the World’s Most Trafficked Animal - This is about the pangolin, the animal that elicited from Prince William this : “the pangolin runs the risk of becoming extinct before most people have even heard of them”. The word part is that it is primarily poached for its scales and their medicinal values - but those scales are made only of keratin, which one can obtain from an umpteen other sources.
   
   
4. The Greatest Fake-Art Scam in History? - “One of his forgeries hung in a show at the Met. Steve Martin bought another of his fake paintings. Still others have sold at auction for multi-million-dollar prices. So how did a self-described German hippie pull off one of the biggest, most lucrative cons in art-world history? And how did he get nailed?”
   
5. Wikipedia’s Great Experiment: Finding a Definition of “Happiness” We Can all Agree on - This is fascinating. It’s a study of the edit history of the Wikipedia page for happiness. The definitions of happiness itself have changed a lot, as expected, but there have been other impulsive edits such as this one user who replaced the definition with “eggs eggs eggs”. Well, whatever one likes best.
   
6. The Deep Space of Digital Reading - Do you read differently in online and in print? This Nautilus piece tells us not to worry about leaving physical print behind because it will always be present with us. How does the proliferation of the internet compare with other ‘reading revolutions’ of the past? Also, reading in print is considered better for ‘deep reading’ or when one needs to learn - and this will probably stay this way.
   
7. How ‘Qi’ And ‘Za’ Changed Scrabble - FiveThirtyEight examines the global trends in Scrabble after the introduction of a large number of two-letter words such as Qi and Za. Rather fascinating.
   
8. Is It O.K. to Tinker With the Environment to Fight Climate Change? - “Scientists are investigating whether releasing tons of particulates into the atmosphere might be good for the planet. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea.” I agree that this isn’t a great idea, because it only delays the inevitable. Also, geoengineering techniques as promulgated in this piece will give us a rationalisation for carrying on what is destructive to the environment in other ways. It’s about time we stop the rot right at the start.
   
9. What Bullets do to Bodies - “The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront every day.” This is about Dr. Amy Goldberg, a trauma surgeon in Philadelphia who believed that this article wouldn’t change anything, despite being rather graphic and gory in the details. It’s thoroughly fascinating.
   
10. Microwaving Your Tea, The Controversy Explained and Refuted - There’s a lot going around about how microwaving one’s tea is the best way it is done, but here is an article that echoes my views. Since this is something I’m rather passionately attached to, I thought it important enough to be shared here. Microwaving tea, for the record, may be best for extracting nutrients and vitamins from the tea, but isn’t best for taste. There. I said it.

Thanks for hanging around. See you next week.