American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

I wanted to check it out before the movie comes out, and I highly recommend it for a very in depth view of his life.

I also recently finished On the Origin of Time, by Thomas Hertog, which I also recommend. It's about Stephen Hawking's final ideas and theories, told by one of his closest proteges. There are some incredible ideas in this book that I had never heard of before, and I'm a cosmology nerd.

There's always the remarkable story of Rasputin's death. He was an advisor to Nicholas II of Russia, and refused to die after being poisoned, shot, and beat.

"The would-be killers first gave the monk food and wine laced with cyanide, however, when Rasputin seemingly failed to respond to the poison, they shot him at close range and left him for dead. In spite of these murderous measures, Rasputin revived shortly thereafter and made an attempt to flee the palace grounds, only to be intercepted by his assailants who shot him again and viciously beat him. They then bound Rasputin, who was remarkably still alive, and threw him into the freezing Neva River. His battered body was found several days later and it was reported that there was water in his lungs, indicating that he finally died by drowning."

https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2020/10/the-murder-of-rasputin/#:~:text=On%20the%20night%20of%20December,and%20left%20him%20for%20dead.

I will also add, it's pretty neat that Ernest Shackleton's famed lost ship, the Endurance, was found 100 years to the day that Ernest was buried.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12236603/amp/The-wreck-Sir-Ernest-Shackletons-ship-Endurance-discovered-100-years-day.html

Even worse, in the only third party testing that was performed, by the University of Washington, they rated the original iteration of the Titan only up to 9800 ft. As far as I can tell, Oceangate never redesigned the sub after that, and still decided to take people to 13,000 ft.

Also, given that Rush would brag about how cheap the original hull was, I doubt they fully replaced it when they noticed cyclic fatigue in the sub later. To me it looks like they did some kind of shoddy repair. And that's the Titan everyone ended up with.

Initially, I thought Stockton Rush couldn't be a total moron because he had a degree in aerospace engineering from Princeton, but having followed the college admissions scandal, we know what those degrees are actually worth. Crap.

I do research for my outdoor hobbies. I enjoy stargazing, so when I can't go out, I'll look into good areas to go to next time, or look at new accessories to buy for my telescope.

"CNN has tracked Wagner mercenaries in the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya, Mozambique, Ukraine and Syria. Over the years they have developed a particularly gruesome reputation and have been linked to various human rights abuses."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/23/europe/wagner-prigozhin-criminal-case-explainer-intl/index.html

It sounds like Prigohzin could be a big headache for Putin.

And Prigohzin is responsible for some of the bloodiest fights in Ukraine.

Perhaps Putin abandoning his people in Moscow to a rabid mercenary will push them to revolt and join Prigozhin, out of immediate fear if nothing else

The Noss family treasure, featured in the documentary "Gold, Lies, & Videotape."

More than any other case, and I'm very much into mysteries, I would like to see resolution for this in my lifetime. This family deserves answers.

I would add Bluetooth to this as well.

Very sad. Here's a source for this if anyone's curious:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/10/knife-attack-at-ikea-store-in-sweden

A similar thing happened to me and my husband. We were out of state on vacation, and got a call and visit from the police at 3 am saying that my husband had been kidnapped for ransom. Of course he was laying right next to me, but for half a second I was terrified. It was a complete scam. They think they found my husband's information in a data hack at his school.