Welcome to May! For some of you, this month is the gateway to summer. For me, May heralds the coming of winter. I just hope that the winter you folks in the northern hemisphere just had isn't a preview of what I'm going to get!

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Four Choppers And A Blimp: The Bizarre Piasecki Helistat — Bizarre, indeed, but a fascinating story of the creation and eventual failure of what was one of the more fanciful ideas in aviation history.

From the article:

I did say everything about this aircraft was bizarre, including the agency that commissioned it. As near as I can tell, this is the first and only time the US Forest Service has gotten into the business of building aircraft. Teething problems were perhaps to be expected.

Is the UK falling out of love with social media? — And is it a wholesale re-evaluation of Britons' relationship with social media or, as some argue, merely a shift in how they're using social media? More importantly, will it stick?

From the article:

Right now, lots of us are left with a pretty blunt choice of either using these products that are monetising and hoarding our attention, or having to turn them off altogether. Lots of us would like to see a middle ground.

The Secret Language of Ships — Every in-group has its own codes and symbols and signs, so why not ships? In this case, though, those signs and symbols give offer a wealth of information about an ocean-going cargo vessel.

From the article:

Load lines owe much to a British member of Parliament named Samuel Plimsoll. Worried about the loss of ships and crew members due to overloading, he sponsored a bill in 1876 that made it mandatory to have marks on both sides of a ship. If a ship is overloaded, the marks disappear underwater. The original “Plimsoll line” was a circle with a horizontal line through it. The symbol spread around the world; additional marks were added over the years.

How World War Two changed how France eats — A look at the effect of conflict and occupation on the eating habits of the French, how culinary ideas thought long forgotten have been gradually making a comeback, and how creativity around food, spurred by frugality, of the war years is being embraced today.

From the article:

Fast-forward eight decades, and some locals, now motivated by climate change are turning back to small, local grocers, such as the locavore Terroir d’Avenir shops dotting Paris. Others are reaching into the nation's past to resuscitate techniques like canning, preserving and foraging that saved many French residents during the war, according to Grenard. "The people that got by the best were the ones who had reserves."