New to me: the history of the name Bluetooth. The logo (so obvious in hindsight) comes from the Danish runes for H and B (after King Harald).

“Printers are essentially paper torture chambers”: New Yorker article on why paper jams still persist.

“Paper jams!” he said. “Now you know why the crime rate in Chicago went down.”

Processing bulk natural wood into a high-performance structural material:

Wood is among the oldest materials used by humans, and is still commonly used for building. Its low density has also made it useful for transport applications such as shipbuilding, but this property is associated with a relatively low strength and stiffness. Scientists have tried to devise processes that make wood denser, to obtain materials suitable for high-strength applications, but with limited success. In a paper in Nature, Song et al. describe a densification method that combines a chemical treatment with high-temperature compression, and which produces an unprecedented increase in stiffness and strength.

This is fascinating: Vernacular Economics: How Building Codes & Taxes Shape Regional Architecture.