Nur flagged this one, and he is right that it stings: the room where Lake Street Dive got their start is shutting after nearly thirty years. The small consolation is that there is still a season left, and Club D'Elf are talking about reviving their Friday residency for one last run, which is about as good a wake as a club can ask for.

ESA's Hera is the follow-up visit to the scene of DART's 2022 punch, and it has now got close enough to see the two asteroids as separate bodies rather than one smudge. Not much to look at yet, but this is the moment the forensic part of planetary defence starts.

A spider knocked off a wall has a few milliseconds to turn a liquid into climbing rope, and nobody has managed to copy the trick at scale. Quanta follows the chemistry of the 'dope', the concentrated protein brew in the silk gland, which is the part of the process materials scientists most want to steal.

A site profile for a place that rewards exactly the solo, unhurried birding Nur already does in Penang, only with cranes and mudflat waders on a Korean estuary. Worth bookmarking for the day South Korea comes up as a trip.

Glue is the great LEGO taboo, so paint must be at least a misdemeanour. The builder's realistic animals pick exactly the right parts for the shaping and then fix the one thing LEGO never offered, the colours, and the glossy finish that results is hard to argue with.

Einstein and Szilard patented a refrigerator with no moving parts in the 1920s, and almost nobody has seen one work. Ben Krasnow of Applied Science made a transparent version so you can actually watch the three fluids do their thing, which is the best kind of physics lesson.

Everybody reaches for a Bloom filter and then discovers it cannot delete, count, resize or keep its accesses local. Pandey and colleagues fixed all four at once in SIGMOD 2017, and Colyer's write-up walks through the rank-and-select trick that makes the quotient filter compact and fast.

A Halloween-appropriate pick, though the real subject is infrastructure: cheap pulp paper, the Linotype machine and a better postal network did more for turn-of-the-century occultism than any spirit guide. The adverts and pamphlets that survive are a wonderful archive of hope sold by the ounce.

The Felice Brothers went from busking in the subway to being the band other bands quietly borrow from, and twenty years on the people doing the borrowing have lined up to say so. A good excuse to go back to the originals, which still sound like a barn dance held during a thunderstorm.

Every attic is supposed to hold a treasure, and this one held a crop. An Italian farmer planted seeds he had found lying around for decades and got a strange, many-eared wheat, which he then traced back to a description in Genesis, the kind of seed-bank story that makes you want to check your own loft.

A burst that looked feeble and then threw odd, late peaks in its afterglow turns out to have been perfectly ferocious, just pointed slightly away from us. It is a nice reminder that a lot of astrophysics is geometry with very large numbers attached.

Every school biology lab has dissected one, and most people still file them under droppings. A short, cheerful Audubon explainer for the next time a grey nugget under a roost tree in Penang turns out to be a tiny archive of somebody's dinners.

Building a convincing big cat is hard enough in opaque bricks; doing it in trans parts, so you can see the structure holding it up, is showing off of the best kind. Notice how the cockpit and windscreen pieces keep the muscle shapes readable.

Someone on Reddit asked how to make flowery page margins in LaTeX, and someone else answered with a whole generative system. Every petal is a computed curve, painted in Lua at typeset time, with a space-filling trick borrowed from a 1998 paper on ornament. Pure hobbyist joy, with a nod to the Dutch tiles.

The uncomfortable point here is that the recovery machinery itself can be the loop that keeps a system down: the same response to a timeout is sensible for a blip and disastrous for overload. Follows his talk with Meta's Todd Porter and Dave Maier at SREcon, and worth reading with your own on-call scars in mind.

American debates tend to set the familiar problems at home against a vague 'what every other country does'. Taylor's point is that there is no one alternative: the other rich countries run quite different systems, each with its own trade-offs, and the details are where the interesting economics lives.

Franklin was an oil boomtown, and its money left behind one of only seven churches still holding a complete set of Tiffany Studios windows. The rose window is the third-largest Tiffany ever made. Plain on the outside, which is how the best surprises are packaged.

For the 31st, Wikipedia's featured image is a restored release poster for the first feature-length zombie film, with Bela Lugosi as the villain. Old film posters are a little archive genre of their own, and this one has the full pre-Code lurid treatment.

The three-body problem has no general solution and is usually chaotic, which makes the periodic exceptions all the more satisfying to watch. Numerical searches have turned up thousands of them, looping in figure-eights and braids; Liu Cixin fans will find them oddly reassuring.

Sharp spent a decade as a quarter of Mipso, and his debut solo record is about being a natural team player, middle-child style. He passed through the same Brooklyn scene as Courtney Hartman and Sarah Jarosz, so there's a friend of the feed in the background.

The perennial question of the end-Cretaceous: why did one lineage of big scaly reptiles walk away while the other went extinct. This answer is pleasingly unglamorous, more real-estate than physiology, and it's a nice reminder that extinction survival is often about where you happened to be standing.

A spacecraft that was built for Pluto is still doing science out past it, this time by sniffing the faint hydrogen fog our Sun drifts through. Quanta's piece is about how that measurement feeds into a lumpier, busier picture of our galactic neighbourhood than the textbooks' calm one.

A small, smart eagle worth knowing: Booted Eagles winter as far east as the Indian subcontinent, and they come in pale and dark morphs to keep identifications interesting. The spotlight also explains a scientific name that sounds generic until you look at the legs.

Classic Castle fans will know Majisto as the old wizard of the early-90s sets; Simulterious imagines him at the start of his career. Worth a close look for the lighting gradient in the rockwork and for what the builder turned into dragon bones, which includes sausages.

Apple nearly bought Be before it bought NeXT, and now anyone can poke at the alternate timeline in a browser tab. The write-up is a fun hobbyist tale too, built on the DingusPPC emulator and a personal memory of spotting a BeBox in Akihabara.

A 1997 paper picked by Peter Alvaro as a desert-island favourite, and you can see why: it treats a repeating broadcast as a disk and then asks how to lay data out on it. Anyone who has tuned cache hierarchies will enjoy watching the same ideas reappear when the client can barely talk back.

A calm, numbers-first piece, which is the house style. Taylor's first move is to compare the headline fortune with the long-run funding gaps in Social Security and Medicare, a useful sanity check whatever your politics, before getting to how household wealth has grown relative to the economy.

Not a favourite-artist pick, but the record sits squarely in the tradition that Aoife O'Donovan and I'm With Her come out of, and the review draws that line itself. Good on how the three voices fit together and why the album keeps getting cited by newer harmony groups.

The kraken turns out to be real, if rather less interested in ships than the sailors claimed. The Asturian coast has a deep submarine canyon nearby where giant squid turn up unusually often, so a small fishing town ended up with a whole museum of them. A good stop on any northern Spain trip.

A Halloween-appropriate pick that's more botany than spookiness. Maria Popova pairs Pollan's argument that gardens were long about the power of plants rather than their looks with Emily Dickinson's witch-hazel, and the broomstick origin story is the kind of thing you will repeat at dinner.

Eastern Utah keeps paying out, and this time the Utah Geological Survey has a fresh quarry near Moab with bones it thinks may belong to something unnamed. Note the careful word 'possible': the formal description comes later, after a lot of jacketing, prep work and arguing. Still, a new bonebed a short drive from Arches is the sort of thing that keeps a field season interesting.

The Event Horizon Telescope trick never gets old: wire up radio dishes across the planet, time them with atomic clocks, and pretend the Earth is one enormous lens. Doeleman led that effort, so this is the explanation from the person who actually did it. Notice that it is the shadow, not the hole itself, that ends up in the picture.

A local field guide written partly by Amar-Singh HSS, whose Perak observations turn up all over the Bird Ecology Study Group, and reviewed by James Eaton, who knows the region's birds better than most. If the Penang list needs a book that actually matches what flies past, this is the candidate. Reviews like this are how you decide which book rides in the bag.

This one rewards the zoom button: the roofs, the round gateway and the foliage hide a pile of clever part usage under a deliberately calm surface. The Brothers Brick even sets a little puzzle about the flowerpot, and the answer is a properly LEGO joke. Simplicity, as usual, takes a lot of bricks.

Every sufficiently capable config format eventually becomes a programming language, usually by accident. Here someone shows that two harmless-looking curl features, variable slicing and nested config includes, were enough to run a two-counter machine. The fix was a modest include-depth cap, which is the most curl response imaginable.

The double-underscore user-access helpers were a speed hack from an era when skipping the address check felt worth the risk. Now that set_fs() is long gone and the checks are cheap, they have been removed outright. The interesting part is how long a 'just convert the callers' job takes in a tree this size.

Venice had a long-running tradition of rival neighbourhoods meeting on railless bridges and fighting it out, with crowds watching and the canal waiting below. Painters loved it. The Public Domain Review gathers the pictures, which manage to look both chaotic and oddly choreographed.

A short hike from the Garrison train station that packs in a vine-covered ruin, a footbridge over the tracks, Hudson views and a bamboo grove. The Revolutionary War footnote is the hook: this is the path Benedict Arnold took when his plot came apart. Easy to reach by train from New York, which is half the charm.

Long before blogs and forums, British SF fans swapped their fanzines through OMPA, a postal club founded in 1954. Rob Hansen is fandom's best archivist, and TAFF giving the book away free is very much in that spirit of sharing things for the fun of it. Good reading for anyone who likes the history behind the history of the genre.

The party game assumed Bacon was special, and the graph theory says otherwise: plenty of actors sit closer to the middle of the film network than he ever did. A nice small dose of network science wrapped in a pop-culture joke. Bacon, to his credit, has always been in on it.

Two megaraptors in one week, one from a Surrey museum drawer and now one from Argentina, which is roughly where the group was always supposed to be at home. The skeleton is incomplete, as these things always are, so the fun is in watching palaeontologists argue a whole predator out of the pieces. Look at the picture and count the claws.

A Halloween-ready release, and one of the better demonstrations of why you want both telescopes. Hubble sees a dark, cat-shaped pillar of dust; Webb, looking in the infrared, sees straight through the fur to the young stars forming inside. Put the two images side by side and play spot-the-difference.

Earth's defence against the solar wind is a fairly tidy bow shock. Jupiter, being Jupiter, runs a layered affair of strong plasma waves and several distinct shock regions instead. The nice twist is that this giant-planet plumbing may help explain the far larger shock waves thrown off by exploding stars.

A bird build for a birder. Mike Sinclair, who did a blue heron last year, is back at the pond with a swan gliding through reeds and lily pads. The real trick is the water: a mosaic that pulls off a crisp mirror reflection, which is harder to fake in bricks than it looks.

Nobody has ever asked this at a park pond, as the author admits, but now you will be ready if they do. Coots are one of those birds everyone walks past, which makes them a good subject for asking how wildlife adjusts to people. A short read built on a real study, with a handsome common coot up top.

Savage and friends in 1997, and still the paper anyone who has stared at lockdep output should have read. Instead of chasing happens-before relationships, Eraser just checks that every shared variable is consistently protected by some lock, and refines the candidate lockset as it watches. Cheap, blunt and surprisingly effective; notice how much of the design is about tolerating initialisation and read-sharing without drowning you in false positives.

Taylor doesn't hide his scepticism of the current tariff regime, but this post is mostly a calm tour of the research. The standout is a database of US tariff rates back to 1789, built from 19th-century congressional documents, which sorts American history into revenue, restriction and reciprocity eras. Notice how tariffs have drifted towards hyper-specific goods, types of cheese and so on, as a way to aim at particular countries.

Industrial ruins slowly being reclaimed by a river forest, reached on a decent hiking trail, free, and open in daylight. The brick footings and a washed-out stone dam upstream are what is left of the system that once piped drinking water eight miles to Durham. Good for a quiet walk with binoculars.

James Davis Nicoll goes digging in the decade of oil shocks and finds SF writers cheerfully inventing their way out of it, with Asimov's The Gods Themselves and its universe-swapping power source front and centre. It's an affectionate look at an era when the fix was always one bold idea away. Bonus: Nicoll grumbling that his colleagues are too young to be nostalgic for anything.

The Lycurgus Cup is green when lit from the front and glows red with light behind it, thanks to a sprinkle of gold and silver nanoparticles that its Roman makers could not possibly have known they were using. Now a Sheffield team has made the same dichroic glass on purpose and cast it into a modern take on Atlas. Sixteen centuries later, we finally have the recipe card.

A favourite artist, so it goes in without debate. We ran the tour announcement a few days back; this is the first word from an actual stop on it, and the verdict in the headline is unambiguous. Worth a look to see how the old songs sit a decade on.

Not the cheeriest item, but for anyone who grew up with a bald Shakespearean captain quoting the Bard on a starship, it would be odd to leave out. Reactor's notice is brief and respectful, the way he'd probably have liked it.

Beta Pictoris is the nearest thing astronomers have to a baby photo of our own solar system, and its odd trailing dust feature has nagged at people for a while. The proposed culprit is a smash-up between two Pluto-class bodies, which is exactly the sort of thing that must have happened here too.

The coronal heating problem has been 'solved' roughly once a month lately, which is half the fun. This one goes after spicules, the needle-like jets in the lower solar atmosphere, and argues we've been interpreting them wrong.

Microcontrollers now outclass the desktops of the late 80s, so someone was bound to try running a desktop on one rather than emulating one. Underneath the early-Macintosh look sits FreeRTOS, which invites the old argument about whether this is an OS or a distro.

The person who already ported Windows NT to the GameCube and Wii has now brought up classic Mac OS on the same hardware, probably the first new-platform bring-up of the old Mac OS outside Apple since the clone era. The write-up revels in the decades of accumulated jank, which is the right attitude.

An ASPLOS '16 paper with a pleasingly contrarian thesis: strip a static checker down to almost nothing, ignore most of the language, and it still finds real bugs. Anyone who has watched an analysis tool sprawl into its own maintenance burden will nod along.

A huge arcaded square in Galicia, named for a woman who rallied the defence when the English came over the walls in 1589. The history is the hook; the square itself, at about a hectare, is the reason to stand there.

A cartogram for the networking crowd: shrink and swell every country by its share of IPv4 addresses rather than its land area. The early allocation history jumps right off the map.

Kyla doing what she does best: taking a sore everyday topic and calmly unpicking it with someone who used to run economic policy. The interest is in the mechanics and in what a modest fix would actually look like, not in the outrage.

Every space weather talk cites the same old railway anecdote, and it turns out the citation had the year wrong all along. There is something very satisfying about historians of science doing the archival equivalent of a git blame and finding the bug. Bonus: a reminder that the Sun was messing with infrastructure long before there were satellites to break.

The textbook line is that meteors quietly vaporise; the new work says they melt, crack and shatter in a messier sequence. Worth reading for the mechanics alone, and it also explains why meteorites tend to land as a scattered field rather than a single tidy rock.

Adrian Colyer called this one fabulous, and for once the superlative is earned: stronger guarantees and better throughput in the same ext4 patch set. The trick is splitting filesystem operations into streams with ordering inside each one, which anyone who has fought journaling modes and rename-dance recovery code will appreciate.

Module signing and reproducible builds have long pulled in opposite directions, since a per-build signing key makes byte-identical output impossible. This Plumbers talk lays out a hash-based way around that, and LWN's write-up has the usual sharp detail on where the patch set has been and where it might go.

The late-90s backpack pet is back, and this time someone found the serial port. A cheap USB adapter, some nickel strips and a printed case are all it takes, and of course the demo ends with DOOM running on it, because that is the law.

Digby's powder was supposed to heal a wound by treating the weapon or a bloody bandage, miles away. It is best remembered for the later, gloriously grim idea of using it to find longitude at sea with an injured dog, but the treatise itself is a fine window into seventeenth-century reasoning by analogy.

Atlas Obscura could not resist the puns and neither can we. A small hill near a bike trail has slowly filled with gnomes, many dropped off by strangers for the owner to mend and add, which is about as wholesome as roadside folk art gets. There is an honour-system snack stop too.

Clay tablets sent to the pharaohs more than three thousand years ago turn out to read a lot like a modern inbox: complaints about slights, begging for help, and endless requests for gold. A short Aeon video, and a calming reminder that statecraft has always been mostly small grievances.

An asymmetric game of two foxes against twenty sheep, older cousin of Fox and Geese, put through some proper game analysis. The fun is in the details, like how small the first-move advantage turns out to be and how the game can loop forever, which makes solving it trickier than it looks.

Twenty years of daily strips, without a gap, from one artist on a personal blog. In an era of abandoned webcomics and dead links, a run like that deserves a quiet round of applause, and File 770's look at it is a gentle bit of fandom news.

A ticket listing is thin gruel, but it marks something real: Undercurrent, the record where Jarosz stripped things back and let the songs carry the weight, is ten years old, and she is touring it. The Monterey date has already been and gone, so treat this as a nudge to check where the tour heads next. Any excuse to put that album back on is a good one.

Betelgeuse spent years being the star everyone expected to explode on cue, and the duller explanation keeps winning: it has a partner. New observations show that a close companion is tugging the red supergiant out of round, which could account for some of its famous flickering. Less fireworks, more celestial mechanics, which is arguably the better story.

Anyone who has debugged a leap-second bug at 23:59:60 will greet this with relief and a little suspicion. Timekeepers have agreed to stop nudging UTC to track Earth's wobbly rotation, which simply moves the problem far enough into the future that someone else will have to add a whole minute, or an hour, in one go. Kicking the can, but a very carefully measured can.

This one is close to home: the Malaysian Bird Report's latest issue, with notes on telling hawk-cuckoos apart, which is a problem every birder in Penang has stood under a tree and wrestled with. There are also new additions to the national list and some odd behaviour records. Free, local, and written by people who actually go out and look.

History has a sense of humour: the room built for French nobles to play an ancestor of tennis is where the Third Estate swore not to go home until France had a constitution. The hall is a short walk from the palace and far quieter. Worth noting that the deciding point in 1789 was scored entirely off the court.

sched_ext has gone from controversial patch set to a place where people do real scheduling research, and the Plumbers microconference shows the hard problems arriving on schedule. Priority inversion under BPF schedulers and making proxy execution play nicely with them are the interesting knots. The paravirt angle, letting host and guest schedulers talk, is the one to watch.

Fifty years ago, editing meant one line at a time on a clattering teletype; then a gang at the MIT AI Lab made the screen itself editable, and some of us have never left the result. This retrospective walks the road from plugboards to full-screen editors. The editor wars may never end, but one side has at least half a century of seniority.

A searchable pile of old public-domain film, cut into clips you can actually find things in. Kottke went poking and came back with amateur footage of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and a 1946 film on how New York grew. Exactly the sort of rabbit hole the feed exists for, minus the algorithm.

Just across the water from Penang, in Sarawak, grows a parasitic plant that has bet its whole reproductive strategy on smelling dead. It blooms for only a few days, lures flies to do the pollinating, and is endangered, so seeing one takes luck and a strong stomach. Borneo keeps reminding us that the strangest plants on Earth are a short flight away.

Damn Interesting does what it does best: a long, unhurried story about how good science chased a phantom. It begins with Newton fretting that action at a distance was an absurdity, and follows the arithmetic of gravity to a planet that astronomers felt sure must exist. Perfect for an idle half hour, and a fine lesson in how anomalies pay off.

Punch Brothers have spent two decades blurring the line between string band and chamber group, so pairing them with players from the Met Opera's orchestra at Carnegie Hall is less a stunt than a logical next step. Thile has always written like a man who secretly wants a woodwind section. The listing is light on details, but a favourite band in that room is reason enough to flag it.

The Vera Rubin Observatory hasn't formally begun its decade-long sky survey and it has already turned up a sizeable trans-Neptunian object. If the size estimate holds, this is no pebble: it would rank among the bigger bodies out past Neptune. A nice early hint of how crowded the outer Solar System's catalogue is about to get.

Artemis I flew no crew, but it did carry two phantom passengers built to mimic human bone and tissue and stuffed with radiation detectors. The fun part is the instrumentation: passive crystals that store a dose and give it back as light when heated, read out long after splashdown. Low-tech physics doing high-stakes dosimetry.

A raptor-counter's affectionate tour of the three falcons that pass over Toronto each autumn, from the dainty kestrel to the peregrine. None of them are Penang birds, but the Peregrine winters in Malaysia too, so the field notes travel. Worth it for the Merlin alone, a bird that seems to take every passing flock personally.

Some landmarks commemorate battles; this one commemorates barbershop singers deciding a Texas town's claim to the tallest barber pole would not stand. Forest Grove put it up in the 1970s and has kept it striped ever since. It is exactly the sort of committed small-town joke that justifies a detour.

Someone has taken the NetBSD kernel and libc, bolted on busybox and Alpine's apk package manager, and called it AlpineBSD. It is early, there's no installer, and the hardware support caveats are printed right on the front page, which is exactly the late-90s spirit: build the odd hybrid because you can. The project also bans LLM-generated code from its base system, a stance some will find refreshing.

Adrian Colyer at his best: a 2020 ASPLOS paper arguing that constellations of tiny satellites should stop acting as dumb bent pipes and start computing on what they see. Downlink bandwidth is the bottleneck, so the design question becomes how to split work across formation-flying nodes with tight power budgets. A systems paper with orbital mechanics as a constraint is hard to resist.

The Public Domain Review takes one of Britain's worst floods and looks at it through the cheap printed pamphlets that followed, where weather became prophecy and every wave a moral lesson. It is really a story about early modern media: how a young print trade learned that the odd and the ominous sold. The woodcuts alone are worth the visit.

Ordinary tic-tac-toe is a solved, dull draw, but stack it into a 3x3x3 cube and a draw becomes impossible. Futility Closet then flips the rules so completing a line loses, and the winning strategy turns out to be a pleasingly symmetric trick. A good puzzle for a quiet ten minutes with a pencil.

A short teaser hints at a Daft Punk tie-in from LEGO, and the nice twist is that the set is based on a fan-submitted design. Two famously helmeted robots seem a natural fit for minifigures. Details are scarce, but it's the most on-brand collaboration the company has announced in a while.

Dinosaur news from the Weald, where the brick pits keep paying out. A partial skeleton that has sat in the Natural History Museum's collections since 2001 turns out to be a new genus, which says as much about the value of museum drawers as it does about Surrey. The species name honours a local man who never got to see it described, a quietly moving touch.

A critically endangered parrot whose wild population is shrinking in Indonesia and Timor-Leste has, by accident, a stable outpost of about two hundred birds in Hong Kong's parks, descended from escaped pets. Notice the bottleneck: not food or predators but tree cavities, lost to storms and tidy-minded pruning. Close enough to Penang for the nest-box idea to feel familiar.

Webb keeps finding supermassive black holes that seem far too big for how young the universe was, and every theorist has a favourite shortcut. This one is pleasingly mechanical: pack enough stars close together and they start running into each other, merging into monsters that collapse into hefty black hole seeds. Worth noticing how it trades exotic physics for plain crowding.

Brooker opens with the EC2 control plane of 2008, a tree of MySQL replicas glued together with statement-based replication, and works from there to why strong consistency is worth paying for. It's an operator's argument rather than a theorist's: the cost of eventual consistency shows up as weirdness that every application developer has to reason about. No primer here, which is the point.

Proper hacker-space energy: get hold of a boat-mounted satellite antenna, then feed it fake compass headings from a microcontroller so it believes it is bobbing around somewhere. Then sniff the control traffic, decompile the vendor tool and write up the protocol. The photo was apparently taken on the roof of a Dutch hackerspace, which feels exactly right.

A forgotten Edwardian craze in which two teams shove an enormous ball towards opposite ends of a field, and the photographs are as gloriously absurd as that sounds. A small New England link too: the game is usually credited to Moses Crane of Massachusetts in the 1890s. It even turned up on horseback for a while, which raises more questions than it answers.

Robinson has one of the clearest voices in current folk, and handing her to Josh Kaufman, whose Bonny Light Horseman records are all space and grain, is an interesting pairing. The title track of her third Oh Boy album is the first taste of what that sounds like. Worth a listen with good headphones.

For a certain generation, Encarta was the internet before the internet reached the house: articles, grainy video clips and that MindMaze quiz on a single CD. Someone has wrestled the 1995 edition into a static website using the archived disc contents, by their own admission via a brittle and convoluted pipeline. Computing nostalgia as a wildcard, sourced from the Internet Archive.

The sort of place you'd walk straight past: a fenced patch of grass behind a fast-food restaurant, holding settlers from when this was a stage stop on the way west. The Twelve Mile House was where travellers rested their horses, and some of them never left. A small, quiet reminder of how thin the layer of strip-mall Colorado really is.

Bob Gale has put his original draft of Part II back online, and the big swerve is that the almanac plot lands Marty in the late 1960s rather than back in 1955. Fun to read alongside the film for every timeline paradox that got tidied away, and a reminder that the sequel's clever revisit of the first movie was a later idea, not the plan.

Dinosaur news, and a properly odd one. Oviraptorosaurs have long been the Rorschach test of theropod diets, with eggs, shellfish and plants all proposed at one time or another; this one comes with an intact skull whose beak and jaw look built for mashing soft fruit, much like a parrot's. Notice that the fossil came out of the ground in 2011, which is a reminder of how long a good skull can wait in a prep lab for its moment.

Opportunity's mileage record stood for years as the gold standard of planetary road trips, and it took that rover nearly fifteen years to set it. Perseverance has beaten it in about five and a half, mostly thanks to an autonomous driving system that lets it plan its own path instead of waiting on the round trip to Earth. The flight software folks deserve a quiet nod for this one.

A star like the Sun swells up on its way out and swallows whatever planets sit too close, which ought to be the end of the story. Here the debris left behind settles into a disk around the white dwarf, and astronomers think they can see two new bodies taking shape in it. Zombie planets around a zombie star, and just in time for Halloween.

The Madagascar Fish Eagle is one of the world's rarest raptors, with only a small population left along the island's western coast and lakes. This short interview with a lodge on the northwest coast is mostly about where and how you might see one, and it is a fine bit of daydream fuel for a raptor fan. Treat it as a travel brochure with better birds than usual.

Cilker's first two records made her a favourite among people who like their Western folk literate and a bit dusty. Her third was cut in Lockhart, Texas with Bruce Robison producing, and she cheerfully describes it as a concept album whose concept is being sad and going to Texas. That kind of dry self-awareness usually means the songs are good.

Most mayors leave behind a few plaques. Manuel José Laredo, who was also a painter and restorer, left a whole palace that mixes Neo-Mudejar brickwork, Gothic revival and early Modernism, with William Morris hovering in the background. It sits a short walk from the station in Alcalá de Henares, which is an easy day out from Madrid.

Before machines set type, fast hand compositors were minor celebrities, and their speed contests drew big crowds and serious prize money. This essay digs the scene out of the archives, including the women typesetters who used it to push for fairer treatment at work. It is also a nice reminder that every automated job once had its champions.

Peter Alvaro and colleagues tackle the question every distributed system designer fudges: where do you really need ordering or sealing, and where are you paying for coordination you do not need? Blazes reasons over a dataflow model of the components and places coordination only where the analysis says anomalies can creep in. Good company for the Viewstamped Replication write-up from this morning's batch, approaching consistency from the opposite end.

Under the keypad, the TRANZ 330 payment terminal turns out to be a perfectly good Z80 computer with UV-erasable ROMs. One hacker mapped out its innards, hooked up a GPS module and a period-correct thermal printer, and made it compute where the planets are. Exactly the sort of pointless, wonderful repurposing that retrocomputing contests exist for.

The classification of finite simple groups is famously a proof spread over tens of thousands of pages that few people have ever checked end to end. A project to formalise it in the Lean proof assistant has turned up counterexamples to one step in a published route through the argument, and has supplied a repaired argument for the case that matters. That is the strongest case for machine-checked mathematics you are likely to see this year.

A favourite artist in the Irish Times, though not for a new record this time. Hayes describes finding herself on the wrong end of AI-driven fraud and how unsettling it is to have something posing as you out in the world. The pool only had the headline, so the details of what was faked and how she found out are behind the link.

Megaraptorans are the big-thumb-clawed predators usually associated with South America and Australia, so one turning up in Britain rearranges the map a bit. Better still, the bones were collected from the Isle of Wight around a century ago and sat unrecognised in a collection until someone looked properly. A fine argument for museum drawers.

A planet this close to its star ought to be bare rock by now, its air long since blown off. Webb says otherwise, and the leading explanation involves reflective mineral clouds plus a magma ocean that keeps breathing gas back out. Notice how much a single brightness measurement is doing the heavy lifting here.

Martian meteorites have long told a chemistry story that contradicts what models of the planet's interior predict. Two Ehime University researchers propose that garnet in the deep mantle is the missing piece, quietly shifting the balance before magma ever rises. Small mineral, big bookkeeping consequences.

Ratites rarely get good news, so this one is worth the minutes. Twenty years ago Darwin's rhea was almost gone from this corner of Patagonia, and now a team of women is preparing thirteen birds for release. A calm, hands-on look at what reintroduction actually involves.

What happens when theme-park fabricators build a hotel for themselves. A miniature castle with a moat and a guardian dragon, a ship stuck in a tower, and a hobbit-ish house under a fake hill, all in a farming village. Pure whimsy, built the hard way over nine years.

In 1525, the year of the German Peasants' War, Dürer sketched a victory column out of baskets, tools and livestock, crowned by a slumped figure with a sword in his back. Nobody has ever quite agreed whether it mocks the rebels or mourns them. The Public Domain Review gives it the careful reading it deserves.

Liskov and Cowling's 2012 rewrite of VR is the replication paper people quietly prefer to Paxos when they actually have to build the thing. Colyer's write-up walks through normal operation, view changes, recovery and reconfiguration, and is good on why VR is a protocol rather than an algorithm you bolt on later.

Every Sputnik-era kid had rocket books on the shelf, and most of them have vanished without a trace. Alan Brown digs one back out, Joseph Greene's Dig Allen series, and reads it with affection and a clear eye. Good company if you remember Tom Corbett or wish you did.

A rare natural experiment: a whole country that had no television until 1999, then suddenly did. This short Aeon documentary looks at what changed, and is gentle about it rather than preachy. Good fodder for anyone who remembers the internet arriving in their own life.

Enantiornithines were the dominant birds of the dinosaur age and then vanished entirely, which makes them easy to forget and hard to picture. This rebuild of Concornis stacks fossil evidence, digital modelling and old-fashioned sculpting, so every feather has to answer to a bone. Worth a look for how much careful inference goes into a single convincing model.

Hubble's early Orion pictures showed proplyds, protoplanetary disks being blasted by nearby massive stars, and the arithmetic said they should have been stripped away long ago. The proposed way out involves a merger, which would change the story of how long the disks have actually been exposed. A tidy example of an old paradox resolved by questioning the history rather than the physics.

A short field note from just down the road in Perak, the kind of careful local observation that keeps regional bird knowledge honest. Glossy Starlings are famously unfussy, but splitting open champak carpels for the red arils had only been suggested, not properly documented. Something to watch for next time a cempaka tree is fruiting near a Penang flock.

There is something very 1999 about serving your own pages from NetBSD with the httpd that ships in base and one extra package for TLS. The author is upfront that it is meant for homebrew projects and small communities, not heavy traffic, which is the right spirit. A pleasant reminder that a web server can still be a weekend afternoon rather than a platform.

Anyone who has watched fsync latency eat a database's throughput will recognise the setup: flash got wildly parallel, but enforcing write order still means draining queues and waiting. Won et al. push an ordering barrier down through the block layer to the device so order no longer implies durability. Adrian Colyer's write-up is a good refresher on why the block layer's ordering story was built for spinning disks.

ZA-001, the very first 787 prototype, now sits indoors at Chubu Centrair near Nagoya with a small exhibition built around it. You can get close to the cockpit and engines, and there's a children's play area alongside for those travelling with small aviation fans. A good excuse to arrive early for a flight out of Nagoya.

Long before forums, curious Britons mailed their oddest historical questions to Notes and Queries and other readers mailed back answers. This selection from an 1858 compilation chases things like what became of Mary Queen of Scots' head and who wielded the axe on Charles I. Quirky history, footnoted by an army of amateurs.

Ruffin's life reads like a tour of nineteenth-century Boston reform: Civil War relief work, charity, suffrage, publishing and the women's club movement. She ran a newspaper and built networks that outlasted her. A solid, calm profile of someone whose name deserves to be better known around Beacon Hill.

Timothy Taylor does what he does best here: take a fat flagship report and pull out the one idea worth chewing on. The argument is that poor countries are short on skilled people, and AI tools might stretch what scarce experts like agricultural extension agents can reach. Sober, example-driven, and free of either hype or doom.

Colonial writers described open, park-like forests and smoky skies, and tree-ring evidence turns out to back them up. The landscape Europeans called wilderness had been shaped for generations by Indigenous burning. A good corrective, told through the slow record of wood.

Another outlet weighs in on Lucky Water, and when it's Laura Cortese, a second opinion is never redundant. The fiddler from the Boston scene keeps turning chamber-folk arrangements into something that sounds both old and freshly built. Compare notes with last week's review and see whether the critics hear the same record.

Clay pits dug for bricks have a long habit of coughing up Cretaceous bones, and this one has given palaeontologists something nobody had named before. The animal lived about 125 million years ago in the wet, river-laced lowlands that once covered southern England. Somewhere a kiln operator is wondering what else went into the walls.

Amphibians and salt water are famously bad friends, which is what makes this flat-headed Triassic oddball worth a look. Two nearly complete skeletons from China suggest this stem amphibian went fully marine, a lifestyle its relatives never managed. Not a dinosaur, but it shared their world and makes a good argument that evolution reads rules as suggestions.

The Sun takes about 27 days to turn, which means trouble can brew out of sight for a fortnight before swinging round to face us. A Southwest Research Institute team now uses probability to estimate where far-side sunspots are likely to be. Space-weather forecasting, in other words, gets a peek around the corner.

Every birder knows the feeling: epic landscape, ancient ruins, and the bird in the bins is a Twite. This post leans into it, pairing grand Silk Road vistas with the drabbest species the region could offer. A gentle, funny tribute to the dull birds that make up most of any trip list.

Smalltalk never went away; it just kept a live image running in the corner. The Pharo crowd shipped nearly a thousand merged pull requests into this one, and is moving its release season from spring to autumn. A small, stubborn community still building a whole environment for the fun of immediate feedback.

The WAL, big pages and batched writes all grew up around disks where seeks were the enemy, so the obvious answer is to tear them out for NVMe. Brooker argues the answer is not what you'd guess, and the reasoning goes through durability and the network rather than raw device speed. A nice corrective for anyone itching to rewrite the storage engine.

Most visitors to Maastricht see a pleasant river city; Geoff Manaugh checked in and promptly vanished below it. The town sits on centuries of tunnels, from medieval limestone workings to 17th-century fortification casemates and NATO-era bunkers. A good argument for adding a torch to the Netherlands packing list.

Condorcet showed in 1785 that majorities can go round in circles, and mathematicians have been poking the wound ever since. Quanta explains how topology, of all things, captures why fair ways to aggregate preferences keep running into walls. Pure maths about elections with no politics in it, which is a rare treat.

Look closely at a Veronese crowd scene and there is nearly always a dog in it, usually more interested in the food than the miracle. Thomas Laqueur follows those dogs through half a dozen paintings and into the painter's awkward interview with the Inquisition. Art history from floor level.

Fresh McEvoy coverage, which by house rules walks straight past the bouncer. The local paper frames her, as everyone does, as the writer of the song that sold more copies in Ireland than almost anything before it, but the more interesting thing is that she is still out doing small-room dates decades on. The pool only carried the headline, so dates and venue details are behind the link.

The solar wind is usually described as a firehose, which undersells how knotted it is. Parker has been flying close enough to see magnetic structures twisting up as they leave the Sun, and the point of interest is the bridge between big fluid-like plasma behaviour and what individual ions are doing. That gap is where the old puzzle of the too-hot corona may finally get some purchase.

Ancient eclipse records are one of the few ways to measure how Earth's rotation has slowed, and they only work if you know where the observer was standing. Here the fix was mundane and lovely: an ancient Chinese capital sat about eight kilometres off from where people had assumed. Shift the city, redo the geometry, and the length of a day nearly three thousand years ago comes into sharper focus.

Picathartes are the bald-headed, bright-skinned rockfowl that birders cross continents to see, and this one wandered into footage meant for chimpanzees. The find is in the Luki reserve in western DR Congo, which makes it a strong argument for treating the forest as one system across borders. Bycatch, in the best possible sense.

Japan is known for pearls and jade, so a museum devoted entirely to fossil tree resin in a small Iwate city is the kind of side trip that rewards the detour. Kuji is one of the few places in the country with amber big and clean enough to carve, and the museum claims to be the only one of its kind in Japan. Bonus: weather permitting, visitors can try digging for their own.

A gloriously pointless question pursued properly. With no 16-bit subsystem on 64-bit Windows, the hunt moves to the early NT era and the odd corner of Win32s, which is where the archaeology gets fun. Anyone who has stared at PE headers and loader quirks will enjoy watching the search narrow.

Reed-Solomon is storage-efficient and miserable to repair: lose one node and you read k others in full. Clay codes from FAST'18 keep the MDS property while hitting the minimum repair bandwidth, and Adrian Colyer walks the layered construction without hand-waving. Old post, still the best way in to why MSR codes stopped being a purely theoretical curiosity.

Every October a chunk of fandom reads Zelazny's last novel a chapter a day, finishing on Halloween, and we are about five chapters from the end. Judith Tarr looks at it through its animal narrators, starting with Snuff, the watchdog who tells the story. A good excuse to start now and binge to catch up.

A century of poster design from one corner of the world, all scanned and browsable, is a fine place to lose an evening. Princeton holds nearly five thousand of them, from 1904 to 2004, and there is a separate Flickr album of Soviet-era work for those who like their constructivism in bulk. Look at the typography as much as the slogans.

Pascal gets credit for the calculator, the wager and a unit of pressure, and almost nobody mentions that his last venture was public transit. In 1662 he helped launch shared carriages running fixed routes on a schedule at a set fare in Paris, the basic idea behind every bus line since. A transit planner makes the case that this was one of the great inventions, and he is not wrong.

Getting to Mercury takes longer than getting to Pluto's neighbourhood would suggest, because the hard part is shedding speed, not gaining it: eight years and a string of flybys. The three-word game is a fluff video, but it's a nice excuse to mark the calendar for the December arrival. Collaborative is doing a lot of work in a mission split between two space agencies.

Apollo brought back hundreds of kilograms of Moon, but all from a handful of near-side sites chosen partly so the crews could land safely. Rocks blasted off the lunar surface by impacts and found in places like Antarctica sample the rest of the Moon at random. The piece is a good reminder that the cheapest sample-return mission is the one physics runs for free.

Everyone goes to Pench for the tigers, which leaves the birds to people who know better. A local guide writes about the reserve's birdlife and how birding tourism feeds back into protecting it. Central Indian dry forest has a different cast from Penang's, but plenty of familiar faces from the same families.

Every New England town of a certain size seems to have a vast brick campus on a hill with boarded windows, and Halloween is when people start wondering why. The answer is a story about nineteenth-century reform ideals, twentieth-century deinstitutionalisation, and what you do with a building designed to hold a thousand people. Worth it for the second half, on what the old campuses are becoming.

A former gcj hacker wanted to call a Java library from SBCL, didn't like any of the bridges, and so wrote a JVM bytecode compiler in Lisp instead, as one does. It's the purest kind of open source project: scratching an itch with a far bigger stick than the itch required. Bonus points for writing the first working version by hand.

Someone read the ESP32-S3's technical reference manual closely enough to notice it has 128-bit SIMD instructions, then used them to make a classic corner detector twice as fast. This is the good kind of embedded hacking: a cheap chip, an obscure corner of the ISA, and real numbers at the end. Source is included.

The usual objection to a big cache tier is that DRAM is expensive, and this paper turns that around: the CPU you stop burning on recomputation and serialisation can pay for it several times over. Murat and Aleksey poke at the 4x claim and the call for richer object caching collocated with the application. Coherence, as ever, is where the hand-waving lives.

For centuries, sober European writers described a Central Asian plant whose fruit was a small living lamb that grazed around its stalk until the grass ran out. The Public Domain Review weighs the candidate explanations, from a furry fern root sold as a curio to garbled reports of cotton. Medieval natural history at its most charmingly confident.

Someone reading an Edwardian text kept running into people not being at full hp, and for a moment it looked like video-game vocabulary had time-travelled. It hadn't, which is the fun of it: the abbreviation was doing a different job a century before anyone counted hit points. A small, pleasing linguistics find.

Fan-designed builds at 1:1 scale are old news among MOC builders, but LEGO turning one into an official set is less common. This one won an Ideas contest themed on hobbies and became a promotional freebie, so you'll have to buy something else to get it. The review is the interesting bit: how the parts fake brushes, pots and a palette.

Chris Thile is one of the great singers in acoustic music, so a Punch Brothers record with no singing at all is a bold flex. It's the band leaning into what they've always been underneath: five absurdly good pickers writing chamber music for a string band. The news hook is the European tour, their first in nearly a decade.

The World Fantasy Awards are the quieter, more literary sibling of the Hugos, decided by a judging panel rather than a popularity vote, which tends to surface books you won't find on airport tables. A winners list like this is a ready-made reading list for the long nights ahead.

OSIRIS-REx's sample capsule keeps paying dividends long after the parachute was folded away. The interesting bit here is that the grains seem to carry material from both sides of the Solar System's great divide, with Jupiter cast as the bouncer who let the crowds mingle.

One active supermassive black hole in an early galaxy is news; three in the same galaxy is a traffic jam. Two of them are close enough to be on course for a merger, and one is growing faster than the textbooks say it should, which is the part theorists will be chewing on.

An unidentified chip from a box of old parts, no matching part number in any databook, and a quick tap with a chisel to get inside: this is Shirriff doing what he does best. The grid of tiny capacitors on the die gives the game away, and the write-up on how switched capacitors fake resistors is the real treat.

Brooker usually argues tail latency matters for users; here he argues it matters for the bill. Borrowing the Lorenz curve from economists to show how much of the mean the slowest requests account for, then running it through Little's law to get capacity, is a neat bit of cross-disciplinary theft.

Plenty of American state universities began life as humble teacher-training schools. Massachusetts opened the first state-funded normal schools in the country, and the long arc from teacher training academy to modern university is a quietly important piece of New England history.

North America is stingy with pink birds, which makes each one a small event in the field. Kenn Kaufman fact-checked the list, and the fun is in how generous you have to be with the word pink before the roster gets past a handful.

Any Lisp programmer will feel a twinge of kinship. Sidney loved brackets so much that his romance Arcadia, unfinished at his death, breaks off partway through one, which is either tragic or the best punchline in English prose.

Everyone over forty has noticed that the years got shorter. A Victorian clergyman put that observation into a short rhyming poem and someone had the good sense to fix it to the front of a cathedral clock, which is about the most fitting place imaginable.

The Spinosaurus argument has been running longer than some sitcoms: river monster, heron with delusions of grandeur, or something in between. This round brings machine learning and a large pile of skeletons to the question, and lands on the soggy side. Worth noticing is the twist in the other direction, where a few marine reptiles turn out to have kept one flipper on the beach.

Exomoon claims have a habit of evaporating on closer inspection, so read this with the usual squint. Still, the setup is gloriously odd: a star, a brown dwarf circling it, and something at least Jupiter's mass circling that. Whether you call it a moon, a planet, or a taxonomy headache is half the fun.

Jepsen taught everyone to fear the network partition; this FAST 2017 study points at the disk instead. Inject a single bad block or read error under a replicated store and watch how often the system shrugs, crashes, or cheerfully propagates the damage to its healthy replicas. A good reminder that replication protects you from failures you modelled, not the ones you didn't.

Somebody needed a laptop, and instead of walking into a shop spent two months designing one around a mini-ITX board and power-tool batteries. The justification offered is 'because I can', which is the only correct one. The write-up on power delivery and the bill of materials is the meaty bit, and the trackball is a nice period touch.

October 19 just went by, so here is the surrender at Yorktown through the letters and recollections of New Englanders on the scene rather than the tidy textbook version. Eyewitness accounts tend to notice the odd details historians skip. A neat bit of anniversary reading.

Plenty of bird conservation groups have dull founding stories; this one started in 1899 because people were wearing whole stuffed birds on their heads. The interview moves on to modern work in the Netherlands, home of the godwit in the lead photo. A good look at how a European BirdLife partner actually operates.

Skip the arguments about what AI will do and look at the bill of materials: chip fabs, data centres, power plants. Timothy Taylor walks through a Brookings paper on how that physical buildout is being financed, which is a calmer and more useful question than most of the discourse. Treat it as an infrastructure story, the kind economists know how to read.

Most visitors see Maastricht's squares and cafes; Geoff Manaugh checked into his hotel and vanished beneath the city. Eight centuries of limestone quarrying, 17th-century countermine tunnels and Cold War bunkers all sit within an afternoon's walk. A good itinerary for anyone who prefers a torch to a tour bus.

Long before pop-up books were about trucks, the flap book was about transformation and, inevitably, the grave. Lift a flap and Adam becomes Eve, a lion becomes a griffin, and the moral arrives right on schedule. The Public Domain Review's scans make the mechanism easy to follow.

A workshop founded in 1882 still smoke-dries bonito over a hand-tended fire, a method only a handful of places keep alive. Watching six months of boiling, smoking, patching and mould turn a fish into something you could build furniture from is oddly calming. The ideal idle-moment video.

Birds spent the Jurassic barely getting the hang of flight, and here is one that apparently decided the whole business was overrated. If the reading holds, flightlessness turns up almost as soon as flight does, which makes the ostrich look less like a late dropout and more like a family tradition. Teeth and a grasping claw included, for the nostalgic.

Before the giant LSST camera went in, Rubin ran for a few weeks on a small commissioning camera whose whole job was to shake down the plumbing. Its leftover frames are now being released, and the Seagull Nebula shot shows what the telescope can do even when the instrument on the back is the understudy.

A honky-tonk songwriter going back to the tunes that made him want to play in the first place is a familiar move, but it is usually done with less commitment than this. No Depression's review hears him serving the songs rather than restyling them, which is exactly what the old-time crowd tends to want.

Somebody picked a bargain-bin business sim at a mall in 2004 and, twenty years on, cracked it open to see how its little isometric city works. The fun part is the method: Ghidra for the four thousand functions, live memory peeking to map cash and camera state, and a patched message loop to drive the game from outside.

Charapko admits he keeps trying to leave state machine replication and keeps getting dragged back. This one leaves the protocol's core alone and goes after the tail: what happens to throughput when one replica is sluggish, the network splits, or log compaction kicks in at a bad moment. Worth it for anyone who has watched a healthy Paxos cluster stutter for no visible reason.

Timothy Taylor in his natural habitat: one report, one set of charts, no sermon. The interesting bit is the accounting, where productivity is whatever output growth is left after land, water and inputs are tallied, and that residual has been sagging for over a decade just as the world needs it most.

The Bird Ecology Study Group keeps doing the patient work of noting exactly who eats what, which is how field guides eventually get better. A mostly insect-eating babbler adding another fruit to its menu, recorded at Kledang-Saiong, is about as close to home as these records get.

Revere gets remembered for one night's ride, but he spent a lot more time on the dull and useful business of organising Boston's craftsmen. The Mechanic Association was part guild, part mutual-aid society, and later a sponsor of big industrial fairs, a nice reminder of how artisan Boston looked after itself.

Before boardwalk amusements got loud, people paid a coin to look at elaborate figures carved out of wet sand, knowing the sea would take them by morning. The Public Domain Review's selection preserves an art form whose whole premise was not being preserved.

Marilou Schultz has woven die photographs of chips before, and this time it is the 555, possibly the most-sold integrated circuit ever. Ken Shirriff does what Ken Shirriff does and explains which bit of the rug is which bit of the silicon, so you can admire the comparators and the weaving at the same time.

Every space telescope launch story eventually has a chapter about mirrors, and usually it is the anxious kind. This one is the opposite: a nudge smaller than a sliver of a hair and the Wide Field Instrument now beats its own error budget by a wide margin. Nice to see the alignment engineers get the headline for once.

When two supermassive black holes merge, the gravitational waves can carry away momentum unevenly and give the newborn hole a shove. Theory has said so for decades; the fun part is the image of a monster black hole pacing back and forth through its own galactic centre like a pendulum. The evidence is statistical rather than a single smoking gun, which is exactly how these things usually start.

A palate cleanser from 10,000 Birds: species given the opinions their natural history implies. The cuckoo on parenting, the starling on native species, the hoatzin on personal hygiene. Silly, yes, but every joke is a real bit of biology, which is the best kind of silly.

Taylor's quiet point: economists have a decent recipe for a demand collapse, and much less of one when the shock hits what the economy can produce. Spending and rate cuts can prop up demand, but they cannot conjure up missing goods. A calm, useful frame for a lot of recent economic news.

Vermont spent fourteen years as its own republic, and some of the furniture from that era is still in use. Its county courts have had elected assistant judges continuously since then, and no other state does it. The kind of local oddity that only makes sense once you know the history.

A spiral staircase with no newel post, held together by wooden pegs, rising two full turns to a choir loft. Nobody recorded who built it, which has given legend plenty of room to work. Go for the carpentry; the mystery is a bonus.

Old TV collectors have the same problem as old radio fans: nothing on the air. Someone who worked in a 1990s transmitter control room solved it by building a miniature broadcast chain, waveform monitor and vectorscope included, mostly out of Raspberry Pis. Pure hobbyist joy, and a good tour of what a TV station actually had in its racks.

Homologation specials were road cars built in just enough numbers to let the racing version compete, and they are mostly extinct. Toyota's GR Yaris is the modern exception, and Mihail Rakovskiy has captured its odd three-door rally stance in bricks. Car MOCs live or die by their shaping, so look at the curves.

From the archive: Adrian Colyer working through Shapiro and colleagues' 2011 tour of state-based and operation-based replicated data types. The appeal is principled eventual consistency, with consensus pushed off the critical path rather than waved away. Still the paper people mean when they say CRDT.

Thomas Gainsborough wanted to paint landscapes but had portraits to pay the bills, so he brought the countryside indoors. Broken stones, moss, vegetables and shards of mirror, all set on a folding table and painted by candlelight. An eighteenth-century model railway enthusiast, minus the railway.

Aerocapture is the orbital equivalent of parking by scraping the curb: one pass through a planet's atmosphere to shed enough speed to stay, no big braking burn required. It has been on the wish list since before most flight software engineers were born, because guidance, heat shielding and orbital mechanics all have to be right at once, with no second try. Worth noticing how much of the problem is closed-loop control rather than hardware.

Long before distributed SQLite became a crowded category with funding rounds attached, one engineer bolted Raft onto SQLite over a weekend because a clustered system needed a little relational storage and no node wanted the job. This is the founder's own history, written partly to correct the record, and it's at its best on the unglamorous parts: what replicating every write actually costs and what a decade of users taught him.

Every database's isolation-level dropdown descends from this paper, which defined consistency in numbered degrees decades before the ANSI committee muddled the names. Adrian Colyer's write-up walks through what Gray and colleagues meant by each degree and where the later standard parted ways with them. A good reminder that the anomalies we still argue about were catalogued half a century ago.

The Apple Network Server was a Power Mac 9500 in a big case that Apple deliberately stopped from running Mac OS, then promised a ROM swap that everyone assumed was vapourware. Leaked preproduction ROMs proved otherwise, and here a hobbyist who discovered he owned one has packaged up the extensions needed to make it usable. Peak retrocomputing: archaeology, stubbornness and a working result.

SHIPtember asks builders for a spaceship at least a hundred studs long in a month, and the real treat is always the work-in-progress photos. This one is built around swirling vortex shapes that look as if they shouldn't be possible in LEGO, and the progress shots show they began as a chain of Technic frames. Technique first, spaceship second, which is exactly how it should be.

Newport is mostly known for gilded mansions, but out in the harbour sits a small lighthouse on an island with a military past of its own. It isn't even Rhode Island's oldest light, which makes its story more interesting rather than less. Bring binoculars; the all-round view across Narragansett Bay is the point of the climb.

Kyla's starting premise is hard to argue with: most career advice was written for an economy that has since moved out. Her new show with Vox asks what still holds and what the job market really looks like now, which is the kind of question she answers with data and calm rather than doom. A good fit for her style of explaining.

Ospreys are the raptor that made a full comeback in living memory, and a reservoir in a state park is exactly where you'd go looking. This guide comes from a young birder who has been at it since she wandered into a neighbour's feeder-filled yard at seven, and the affection shows. Nice photography, and a reminder that good local patch knowledge beats a long trip.

Low-tech Magazine makes a case for the humble handcart that is part history and part engineering argument: cheaper than a cart animal, easier than carrying, and it doesn't have opinions about where to go. The lead photo shows one fitted with a sail, which tells you what kind of read this is. Thoughtful, slightly contrarian, and oddly calming.

The Public Domain Review has gathered kite pictures from 1430 to 1929 and about a dozen countries, which turns out to be a tour of what each era thought a kite was for: play, war, science or simple showing off. The early ones sit somewhere between toy and military signal. Good browsing for an idle five minutes.

The quiet Sun is the bit solar physicists used to treat as wallpaper between the exciting active regions. Lift a telescope above most of the atmosphere on a balloon and the wallpaper turns out to be full of wiring. Worth noticing is the claim that surface twisting shapes the threads, which is the sort of cause-and-effect that coronal heating models have been short on.

A short one, but the rule here is that anything from the flight software crowd gets through. The call for abstracts went out earlier; now you can actually sign up to sit in the room where people swap war stories about patching code a hundred million kilometres away.

Keeping a lone positron alive is a bit like keeping a soap bubble in a room full of pins, so the endurance alone is impressive. The real point is precision: an isolated antiparticle you can watch for weeks is how you compare matter and antimatter closely enough to catch them disagreeing, if they ever do.

A proper field note from Ipoh, just down the road in birding terms, about a bird most people drive past without a second look. The interesting bit is the asynchrony: in one flock some birds are in full ginger breeding dress while others have barely started, and the species is now breeding further south in Perak than the books used to say.

Everyone who has watched Jepsen take apart a database has wondered whether it's luck. This Morning Paper write-up of Majumdar and Niksic's POPL 2018 paper says no: for the bugs that need only a few partitions in the right order, random exploration covers them with high probability in a modest number of tests. A nice bit of theory explaining something practitioners already trusted.

Doom gets the credit for squeezing miracles out of old hardware, but this author argues the city builders did something harder: simulate an economy, not just draw walls. A good read on the tricks game programmers used when every cycle was spoken for.

A war fought mostly over lumber, with militia, surveyors and a great deal of indignation, and settled by diplomats before it really got going. It explains why the top of Maine looks the way it does on a map, and why the largest county east of the Mississippi is up there at all.

Before Conan Doyle's dinosaurs became the template, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History was writing his own lost-world fiction with fresh science folded in. The essay is honest that the book is a slog, which is part of the fun: you get the history of the genre without having to finish the novel yourself.

A 1677 book of alchemy with no text at all, just engraved plates, which makes it the IKEA manual of the Philosopher's Stone. This copy belonged to Carl Jung, who naturally read a great deal into it. Look for the couple working side by side at the furnace: the 'humid way' was apparently a two-person job.

A sleepy amateur race in County Meath, a single phone line, and one man who had thought very carefully about both. Damn Interesting tells it at length and with obvious relish; it's one of those Irish stories that gets better every time it's told in a pub, and this is the long version.

Utah keeps doing this: you turn your back on a stretch of sandstone for five minutes and it hands over a new species. The segment is short on anatomy, so treat it as the headline and watch for the paper with the proper name and the cladogram.

Sacramento public radio wraps a day of local news with a visit from Alasdair Fraser and family, which is the correct way to end any programme. Skip ahead past the earlier segments if you only came for the fiddle; nobody will judge.

Geomagnetic reversals have been suspected of extinction crimes for decades without ever quite being convicted. This new work finds a tight cluster of flips lining up with an extinction and a flood-basalt eruption, which is still circumstantial, but it's a much nicer alibi problem for the defence.

Not a primer so much as a set of working exhibits: you get to click Next txg and watch the uberblock ring advance, then change the sector size and see the slot count fall. If you've ever explained pool import to a colleague with a whiteboard and some hand-waving, this is the whiteboard done properly.

The nice trick here is that nothing gets opened up: the GBA's old multiboot feature, built so friends could share one cartridge, now ships a synthesizer straight into RAM. No soldering iron, no sacrificed consoles, just a link cable and some very period-correct bleeps.

Every culinary revolution needs an early adopter willing to be stared at, and in Newport it was apparently an Italian marine painter. A good small story about how a whole region came round to something the rest of us now take for granted on pizza.

Most visitors photograph the green bridge with the vintage trams and move on. The trick is to come when the Danube runs low and look down, where the wreckage of the original span is still lying in the river.

Worth a look mostly for the useful footnote: these are the Clarke Foundation's own honours, not the British literary prize for the year's best SF novel. Sir Arthur would probably have enjoyed the confusion, and then corrected everyone in a long letter.

Vienna in 1907 was busy inventing modern design, and here is one of its young artists using the humble postcard to mix medieval grotesques with bright folk colour. They look like they could have been printed last week by a very good risograph studio.

Someone finally checked the sky against the canvas: in mid-June 1889 the moon over Saint-Rémy should have been fat and waning, not the crescent Vincent painted. Astronomy as art history, which is the best kind of pedantry.

Chris Thile and company returning to a Connecticut college stage is the sort of news that justifies the whole favourite-artists list. Storrs is a long way from Penang, but a Punch Brothers date on the calendar is still worth knowing about, if only to imagine the Bach-to-breakdown setlist.

No dinosaurs this time, but the next best thing: a Cretaceous lizard frozen mid-escape in Burmese amber. Behaviour almost never fossilises, which is what makes this tiny tail-drop so satisfying; the trick it shows is one modern geckos still pull on cats.

Mars is usually filed under geologically retired, so it is nice to see the planet's great canyon system still shifting. Worth noticing how far the evidence has to stretch: billions of years after it formed, the 4,000-kilometre scar is apparently not finished.

Proper Malaysian field notes, just down the road from Penang: careful watching of who is actually eating the fruit and who is only picking off insects. Sparrows and Spotted Doves at the mesocarp were new even to the observer, which makes this a nice thing to look out for next time you pass a plantation edge.

Brooker makes the case for building animations to get an intuition for how systems fail, and picks a cracking example: one replica whose storage lies about fsync is enough for Raft to lose acknowledged writes. Anyone who has argued with a disk controller's write cache will nod along.

The RepRap dream of machines that build things, scaled down to the micron. The new head is mostly off-the-shelf fibre and UV LEDs, which is exactly the build-it-in-your-shed spirit; the resulting Benchy is small enough that photographing it is the hard part.

After a summer of nervous headlines about the Davis Square building being put up for sale, the theatre's future looks settled. A century-old single-screen-and-stage palace that also hosts folk shows owning its own roof is about as cheering as Boston real estate news gets.

Some towns get statues of founders; Perstorp got its vinegar bottle, red cap and label included. The best detail is the 1994 unveiling, where a TV chef explained how to squeeze an egg into a bottle using vinegar, which is the most on-brand speech ever given.

The Le Guin Prize goes to books that imagine real alternatives to how we live, taken straight from her 2014 National Book Awards speech, so the winner is always worth a look. This year it heads to New Zealand, with a jury that includes Nicola Griffith and Fonda Lee.

A spider with a spring-loaded silk trap tuned to a single prey species, the notoriously bad-tempered green tree ant. The lovely twist is that the ants may be goaded into setting it off themselves, which is the Roman ballista, reinvented by an arachnid.

Watchhouse on a hometown bill with Hiss Golden Messenger, Tift Merritt and Karly Hartzman reads like a short history of North Carolina's roots scene on one stage. That they were doing it to get out the vote for Roy Cooper's Senate run is a fine use of four-part harmony: Carrboro's finest, putting their voices to work for the ballot box.

Herrerasaurids are about as close to the root of the dinosaur family tree as anyone gets, so even a single bone carries a lot of weight here. The interesting bit is not the predator itself but the ecosystem around it: the plant-eaters and cynodonts shifted, and the early meat-eaters apparently just carried on.

Textbook transit diagrams treat planets as tidy black discs, which is a fine approximation until a telescope is good enough to notice the edges disagree. Webb now is. The puffed-up evening side of this hot gas giant is the sort of detail that turns a dot into weather.

Black Skimmers are the birds that fish by ploughing the water with an oversized lower bill, which makes them a neat living sensor for what small fish are doing near the surface. Twenty tagged birds is a modest sample, but enough to show their commute changing.

Every big-day report wants to boast about the total; this one is happy to admit a small island means a short list, and is better for it. The few birds it does get are good ones, an Egyptian Vulture and Audouin's Gull among them, which is the solo birder's eternal consolation.

Day one was the AI-and-specs day; the back half is where the workshop gets back to its usual business of storage, failures and consensus. Note the session pointedly titled 'Hardware will save us all' and the GPU-database talk that concedes two of its three problems are being fixed by the roadmap and the third is engineering.

New hardware for a 1983 home computer standard, released because someone wanted it to exist, is exactly the spirit this category is for. The Yamaha FM chip at its heart will sound instantly familiar to anyone who heard late-80s Japanese game music.

A Great Ball Contraption module has one job, move balls from input to output, and an infinite number of ways to fail at it in front of a convention crowd. Dressing that job up as a pirate ship adds a whole new set of hazards, and the question mark in the title suggests not all of them were avoided.

Every famous invention has an unfamous inventor somewhere upstream, and Morey has a better claim than most. Notice the range: steamboat, an early internal combustion engine and even a primitive car, all from a man most people have never heard of.

Heritage rules usually save whole buildings; here they saved only the front, which leaves an ornate stage-set of arches and shells bolted onto an ordinary street. Fitting, somehow, for a shop that made funerary monuments.

Friction is the villain of every physics homework problem, which is why it is fun to read someone who studies it for a living make the case for it. Tribology underpins everything from bearings to brakes, and the essay takes it all the way out to the stars.

Nur flagged this one as really good, and it is: the view from userspace's heaviest customer, delivered by the person who keeps getting paged when the kernel moves under him. Note the fsyncgate scar tissue and the unexpectedly warm words about working with the io_uring side. Anyone who has been on the other end of an 'application regression' report will recognise both sides of this.

No dinosaurs tonight, but this goes much further down the family tree. The textbook picture of a worm-like burrower at the root of the starfish and acorn-worm lineage takes a knock from a Chinese Cambrian fossil. Worth noticing how much a single well-preserved soft body can rearrange a branch of the tree.

Type Ia supernovae gave us dark energy in the first place, so it is fitting that a big pile of them is now poking at whether it holds still. This joins a growing set of results nudging against the cosmological constant. Not a revolution yet, but the error bars are getting interesting.

A familiar squat shape at dusk in Penang's mangroves and fish ponds, and it turns out the bird has an odd research footnote or two. Watch for the curious nestling sex-ratio study. A good reminder that the commonest birds are often the least looked at.

Hard sci-fi in LEGO means trusses, dishes and no swooshable fighters, and this one commits. The main radar dish is the part to study: nine red bicycle frames hooked together by their handlebars. Parts usage like that is why people keep the odd bits in a separate drawer.

Long before turnpikes and rest stops, a Boston schoolmistress set off on horseback for New Haven and New York, and kept a sharp-tongued journal of the inns and guides along the way. Her account is one of the best windows we have on everyday colonial travel. Imagine the Yelp reviews.

Look at that roster: Stuart Duncan, Michael Cleveland, Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull, Molly Tuttle, Edgar Meyer and more on one stage. The studio album already won a Grammy; this captures the night they played it straight through at the Ryman. Plenty here for anyone who follows the Punch Brothers end of the pool.

A curiosity for the shelf next to the hollow-Earth maps. Samuel Rowbotham, writing as Parallax, built a whole 'zetetic' method out of looking down a Fenland canal and trusting his eyes. The diagrams are earnest and lovely, and it is a useful study in how a confident wrong idea gets built to last.

Every database person has met an indexer like Samuel Palmer, who classified stories by how they made him feel. It took decades before a reader noticed and wrote in. A short, perfect read about why metadata needs a schema.

The 'does it run DOOM' question gets a new answer, and this one is impressive on memory alone: 32 KB is a fraction of the 4 MB the original wanted in 1993. The whole first Freedoom episode is there, saves and all. The drone-controller gamepad is the cherry on top.

San Marino is mostly visited for its towers and its stamps, but just outside the walls is a rock niche that people prayed at from the Iron Age to late antiquity. The finds are the moving part: little terracotta arms and fingers left as offerings. A quiet stop on the way between the towers.

Nur's note calls it brilliant, and the idea earns it: take the world's largest reference work and throw away everything you couldn't walk to before your tea goes cold. It turns the encyclopedia back into what old county gazetteers were, a guide to the ground under your feet. Worth trying from Penang to see which forgotten shophouse or temple has an article nobody reads.

Most of palaeontology happens long after the dig, with dental picks and air scribes and a great deal of patience, and usually behind a closed door. Raleigh is putting that slow work in front of the public. Late Cretaceous, so a few million years older than the museum's famous T. rex.

Every Martian summer morning a cloud the length of a small continent unfurls west of Arsia Mons, then vanishes by lunch, and for decades nobody could make the atmospheric models reproduce it. A new paper offers a mechanism that textbook cloud physics hasn't had a real example of before. Weather that keeps a schedule better than most airlines.

A pleasant reversal of the usual climate story: the birds are part of the engineering. Seabirds haul nutrients from open ocean to roost, and that fertiliser feeds the reef that builds the island. Keep the native trees and the rats out, and the atoll can keep pace.

The sort of note only a patient local birder produces: decades watching one species, then one morning it does something off-script. It's a Peninsular Malaysia record, a short drive from Penang, and a good reminder that field guides are drafts. Bring binoculars to the next fruiting Macaranga.

M-Tron got magnets, red and black and that lovely trans-neon green, but never a pair of legs. Luna S has fixed the oversight with a dense, playable mech that keeps the classic-space rule of features everywhere. Bonus points for the little autonomous walker riding on its back.

Forget dropped r's and 'wicked'. In Berlin, up in the North Country, French Canadian mill families and their English-speaking neighbours cooked up a mixed vernacular odd enough that someone wrote a dictionary of it. A nice reminder that New England speech has more layers than the Boston accent.

The Soviet ES EVM line cloned IBM's System/360 and 370, yet the hardware ended up quite unlike the originals, and only a few hundred of these machines were built. This team nursed a battered front panel back into working order and explains the switches along the way. Lamps-and-toggles restoration in its purest form.

Paul McKenney's 1990 trick is one of those algorithms that looks too cheap to work: hash flows onto a fixed number of queues, rehash now and then, and noisy neighbours mostly stop hurting everyone else. Brooker walks through why the odds are so good and where it fits in modern multi-tenant services. Familiar from the qdisc side, worth seeing argued from first principles.

Only Portland would give a floor covering a public memorial. The 1987 teal carpet with its runway-map pattern turned into a civic mascot, found on socks, beer labels and the occasional tattoo, and when it was retired the city decided it deserved a send-off. A pilgrimage site for anyone who has photographed their shoes in an airport.

Holst finished The Planets in 1918, a dozen years before Pluto turned up, so in 2000 Colin Matthews composed an eighth movement to complete the set. Six years later the IAU demoted the planet, leaving the music orbiting an awkward category of its own. Bad timing, as a sub-genre of musicology.

Every few years a new tyrannosaur turns up and the family tree has to be redrawn in pencil again. This one is billed as a relative of T. rex that doesn't sit where the textbook says it should. The pool only carried the headline, so the details of which bones and which branch are behind the link.

The near side is all dark lava seas, the far side is pale and cratered, and nobody has had a really satisfying reason why. Now there are actual rocks from the far side to argue with, which beats modelling in the dark. Notice that Earth itself is the culprit here: the tidal tug of the home planet may have stirred the young Moon's interior unevenly.

Low-tech, slightly absurd, and it works: a spinning pair of big eyes on a pole, or a kite shaped like a bird of prey, hovering over the nets. Guillemots and razorbills dive for fish and can drown in gillnets, so anything that makes them think twice is a win. The kite version did better, which tells you something about what an auk fears most.

Eli Willsea has a knack for vignettes that tell a whole story in a small footprint, and this one is about as direct as a build gets: a lone figure at the foot of a stair, darkness below, light above. The builder ties it to his own faith, but the image works on anyone who has had a hard stretch. Look at how the lighting does most of the storytelling.

Alasdair Fraser coming to a Northeast Kingdom arts centre is exactly the sort of small-town show that makes New England folk life so good. The Scottish fiddle master has been a cornerstone of the Celtic revival for decades. If you can't be in St. Johnsbury, at least it's a nudge to put on one of his records with Natalie Haas.

Just up the road from Concord and Lexington sits a flag that predates the Stars and Stripes and is still in one piece. Crimson silk damask, an armoured arm reaching out of a cloud with a sword, and a Latin motto with no room for compromise. Its exact age is still argued over, which only adds to the charm.

There is a whole generation of perfectly good internet radios going deaf because stations moved to newer streaming formats. Clifford Farrugia's answer is pleasingly small: a Raspberry Pi in the corner that translates the new streams back into plain old MP3. This is the late-90s spirit in miniature, one person keeping a gadget out of the landfill and sharing the fix.

A map drawn as a circle makes perfect sense once you picture the person using it: a lookout in a tower, turning slowly to scan the horizon for smoke. These were made for Maine's fire towers about a century ago, so they double as a New England curiosity. Maps built around a single point of view are always worth a slow look.

Anything new from the author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is an event, even when it's only a short story and an essay. Reactor's reviewer argues the little volume is more than the sum of its parts. Consider it a pocket-sized return to Clarke's England, footnotes of the soul included.

Tens of thousands of years ago someone in a German cave carved birds, which makes them birders of a sort. Aeon's short film uses the Hohle Fels finds to ask why our species thrived where Neanderthals faded, and suggests that making art was part of the answer. A quiet reminder that people have been looking hard at birds for a very long time.

Not a dinosaur, but it swam above their heads, and the nickname alone earns it a slot. Belemnites are the bullet-shaped squid cousins every fossil shop sells by the bucket, which makes a barrel-shaped one from a family thought long gone all the more fun. Worth noticing: the shape hints at a different lifestyle, perhaps hunting smaller cephalopods.

Euclid was built to map the dark universe across billions of light years, so it is quietly charming that it also tripped over a fresh snowball in our own backyard. Survey telescopes that stare at everything tend to find things nobody asked them to; this is that tradition, continued.

Remember the May boom that rattled windows and startled birds all along the Cape. MIT's Haystack people and colleagues pooled an unusually large pile of ground and satellite data to work out where the rock came from. Nice local detective story with a solar-system-sized map at the end.

Drenthe's hunebedden are the Netherlands' answer to anyone who thinks the country is all polders and bicycles. D27 is the largest of them, older than Stonehenge, topped by a capstone of roughly twenty tonnes, and an easy walk from the Hunebedcentrum. A good excuse for a day trip out of Amsterdam.

Somewhere Tolkien, who redrew his own maps obsessively, would approve of the sheer stubbornness. Over a thousand artists hand-drew Fellowship of the Ring shot for shot, all three hours, 120,000 pages. The first 11 minutes are out; mute it and play the film underneath for the full effect.

Omni was where hard science, airbrushed space art, very questionable parapsychology and genuinely great short fiction shared a binding. Gibson's early stories ran there, which is reason enough to go digging. Settle in; this is a long afternoon of retro-futurism.

New Laura Cortese means it goes in, no committee vote needed. The fiddler and songwriter behind the Dance Cards, long a fixture of the Boston scene, has a new record out, and here is a review to read before putting it on.

Cello and fiddle, two sisters, and decades of playing in each other's pockets. Brittany you know from Hawktail and Crooked Still, Natalie from her long partnership with Alasdair Fraser; this is the two of them together again on a second duo album.

Live write-ups are the next best thing to being in the room, and the Birchmere is about as good a room as American folk has. Aoife on 12 October, with DC duo the Sweater Set warming things up.

Undercurrent was the record that won Jarosz her first Grammys, and a decade on she is taking it back on the road. This profile catches her on the California leg, looking back over the career so far.

Fresh dinosaur news from somewhere that rarely makes the headlines: Zimbabwe, 210 million years ago. The interesting bit is not the skeleton itself but the argument that Zimbabwe's early dinosaurs were a different crowd from the ones down south, possibly because the climate differed. The story is written by the lead palaeontologist himself.

The other branch of the archosaur family tree gets its turn. A UCL team argues that crocodile-line reptiles never really adapted to new climates; they just moved whenever the world warmed or cooled. That same habit may be why they made it through the asteroid when their dinosaur cousins did not.

A pretty picture with a geology puzzle attached. The yardangs on Mount Sharp are the wrong colour and their layers tilt oddly, and one idea is that they are ancient volcanic ash. Curiosity plans to drive up and poke them with its arm in 2027, which counts as a cliffhanger by rover standards.

Japan's sample-return team, the people behind Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, is going after a moon of Mars this time. Phobos is too small to orbit in the normal sense, so landing looks more like a careful bump than a touchdown. The capsule is due back around 2031.

Home-turf reading for a Penang birder. The highlights are a possible cross between Black and Oriental Pied Hornbills, a cuckoo eating eggs, and a White Wagtail subspecies never before recorded in Malaysia. It is citizen science at its best: careful notes by people who simply go out and look.

New England folklore that turned into real neurology. Lumberjacks at Moosehead Lake who leapt and echoed words when startled became a newspaper sensation, and then a research project for George Beard, who tried reciting Homer at one of them. The trail ends, unexpectedly, at Gilles de la Tourette.

A classic BrickNerd technique piece, back on the front page, solving a problem every LEGO city builder runs into. The fix comes from an unlikely place: an arch from the Lion Knights' Castle set. Part numbers are included, so it is something you can actually build.

Her Bluesky post announced it with a YouTube link, so here is a page you can actually read instead. The format is the draw: guests sit a mock job interview, then Scanlon takes their career advice apart and ties it back to how the economy actually works. A gentler way to take the economic temperature than the news.

The trick inside every cheap digital caliper, pulled out, explained and given away. It is a nice example of the old spirit: one person works out how something clever works, builds their own and publishes the boards for anyone to copy. Rev B is in progress.

Most people buy their gas-discharge displays; this maker is coating the glass himself with a home sputtering rig. The first prototype glowed only inside the vacuum chamber and died once sealed, which is exactly the sort of honest failure that makes these projects worth following.

Fresh off a Grammy for Wild and Clear and Blue, the trio put out a record of what they sound like in a room, which is where three-part harmony either holds or doesn't. Aoife O'Donovan walks through the songs and her recent guest turns. A little older than our usual news, included here simply because it's lovely.

Scottish fiddle and cello shouldn't make this much rhythm between them, but Fraser and Haas have been proving otherwise for a quarter of a century. The review singles out Haas's writing, which is worth noticing if you know her mainly as the engine under Fraser's tunes. An August review, here as a bit of decoration.

HPTS is the small, invitation-only workshop where the transaction-processing and storage crowd says what it really thinks, and Murat's trip reports are the next best thing to being there. The disk numbers from Dropbox are the bit to stop on: capacity has outrun bandwidth so far that reading a whole drive now takes about a day and a half.

An argument any kernel maintainer will recognise: the code that everything else depends on deserves the most patience, not the least. Zhang borrows from the slow food movement and ties effort to blast radius, which is a tidy way to say what reviewers have long felt. It is from July, but it has aged into exactly this moment.

A central banker explaining, in plain terms, why the numbers and the national mood have stopped agreeing. Scanlon asks the questions you would want asked and lets him think out loud. The low-hire, low-fire labour market is the phrase to remember.

Corvids keep embarrassing the primates. Two carrion crows named Iggy and Lemmy, which is reason enough to read it, beat monkeys handily on a classic perception task, and their neurons gave the game away within 70 milliseconds. The open question of why bird brains run so fast is the fun part.

A Jordaan side street, a room full of self-playing pianos and a library of punched paper rolls: music stored as holes, which is practically a storage format. Volunteers run it, and the tours are by people who love the machines. Bonus history about who once ran a roll factory in the neighbourhood.

Somebody built a whole alternate-history wargame universe on top of LEGO, gave it away, and grew a community that writes fiction and draws art for it. The designer's point that bricks are the perfect prototyping medium will ring true to anyone who has ever hacked something together. The included squadron instructions are a nice touch.

OSIRIS-REx brought back pieces of Bennu, and now the lab has explained a long-standing puzzle from orbit. It is a good example of sample return earning its keep: you can measure a rock from a spacecraft, but you need it on a bench to see why it behaves the way it does.

Strictly useless and completely delightful: decoding QR codes by hand, error correction and all. It is the same pleasure as reading a hex dump, and you come away understanding what the little squares are actually doing. The human-readable QR variant at the end is a fun twist.

The one conference where the people who write the code that keeps spacecraft alive compare notes, and the talks go up on YouTube afterwards for the rest of us. Registration just opened and the call for abstracts is live, so if a kernel person ever wanted an excuse to talk to the JPL crowd, this is it.

Hell Creek is T. rex country, so it is a nice change to meet a 12 kg neighbour with a weak bite and a sliding jaw that probably preferred fruit. The comparison to a living parrot is the bit that makes it click. Also a reminder that a nearly complete skull can sit in a collection for over a decade before its story gets told.

We tend to tell bird evolution as a straight line towards the sky, and this one walks right off that script. Barely past Archaeopteryx on the family tree, it already had stubby arms and runner's legs, plus a raptor-style sickle claw for good measure. Bird science with a dinosaur chaser.

Plenty of people will tell you the economy feels weird; Scanlon actually draws the wiring diagram. The useful idea here is how three separate stories, energy prices, the data-centre building spree and government borrowing, push on each other. Calm, numerate and free to read.

An Orkney fiddler, a grim Scottish ballad and a Boston-heavy band of players, which makes it a neat bridge between two of this feed's favourite places. Listen for how the strings carry the story while the voices stay plain. She animated the video herself, too.

A builder took LEGO's Monet set and reworked it into a moody night-time palette, then wrote up which part swaps worked and which colours turned out to be liars next to their neighbours. It is a good look at colour theory done in plastic, with a comment from the set's designer about how many bridge colours they tried.

Textbooks insist there are no green stars, and for good physical reasons. This one cheats: it swallowed pieces of its old planetary system, and the sodium they left behind soaks up orange light. The survey also found pink and yellow white dwarfs nearby, so the night sky is a little more colourful than advertised.

Two decades of LTTng, and its maintainer still cannot upstream it piece by piece because the kernel will not export symbols with no in-tree user. Jake Edge's write-up is a fair, detailed look at a real engineering knot rather than a flame war. Anyone who has carried an out-of-tree module will nod along.

A buried crater off the English coast that geologists voted against in 2009 turns out to be the real thing after all. The clinching evidence came from shocked quartz in old oil-well rock cuttings, which is a lovely example of industrial leftovers settling a scientific argument. Close enough to the Dutch coast to count as neighbourhood news, give or take 45 million years.

Two of this feed's favourite things in one small build: a speeder bike wearing a tyrannosaur as a body kit. It is compact enough to actually build this weekend, and the write-up explains the pipe-frame trick underneath. The final jaw detail left out of the instructions is the kind of nerdy footnote worth reading for.

Forensic palaeontology at its finest: researchers measured serration spacing in bite marks, corrected for the angle of the bite, and named a likely suspect. The size gap makes the case, since a turkey-sized raptor was not taking down a half-tonne tyrannosaur, but it would happily clean up after one.

Not every dinosaur find is a skeleton; sometimes it is one 37 mm bone that moves a timeline by tens of millions of years. Worth noticing how much careful phylogenetic work can hang on a single centrum, and how honest the authors are about not naming it.

Opportunity's distance record stood as a monument to plucky persistence; Perseverance matched it in about a third of the time. The interesting part is why: the rover drove itself with autonomous navigation for over 90 percent of the trip. A nice milestone for onboard software as much as wheels.

Ken Shirriff is back at the die photos, this time walking through the 8087's add and subtract microcode line by line. Systems people will enjoy the two-pass normalisation scheme and the candid description of the special-case handling as spaghetti. It is a reminder that IEEE floating point was hard-won silicon before it was a standard.

Pure late-90s energy: no unlocked bootloader, so a Symbian app loads a kernel, switches off the MMU and jumps. The display works by replaying messages sniffed from Nokia's own driver. The open puzzle, a mystery reset a few minutes after boot that may be the baseband watching over things, is the kind of bug kernel people lose weekends to.

A properly hopeful bird story from the neighbourhood: every rediscovery here is from the Philippines, Indonesian Papua or Papua New Guinea. Each came from patient local birders and guides with a camera rather than a big expedition, which a solo birder may find encouraging.

A cosy detective story: one of the earliest recorded cases of space weather affecting technology turned out to be dated before the railway in question existed. Physicists checked timetables and magnetometer records like historians, and the case closes neatly.

Archaeology with a wagging tail. The clever detail is that hairless dogs lack certain teeth because of the same gene, so even bare bones can reveal the breed. The diet results suggest these pups were fed more like children than like the other dogs.

Proof that the best fieldwork sometimes happens in a storeroom. A scrap of skull the museum bought in 1924 turns out to be the first megaraptoran ever found in Europe, which redraws the map for a whole family of big-clawed hunters. Bonus points for a name that translates as unconquered female warrior.

Amateur astronomers pointed a telescope at a well-photographed patch of sky for about a hundred hours and found things nobody had catalogued. Fitting timing for late October. Look for the faint blue wisps; those are the new arrivals.

Every kernel hacker's archaeology dream: someone cleans out a room and finds a nine-track reel labelled with what may be the only surviving copy of Fourth Edition UNIX, the first one mostly rewritten in C. The story is worth it for the reminder of how much of our history lives on fragile media in forgotten cupboards.

A local bird with a solid-ivory battering ram on its face and a call that speeds up into maniacal laughter audible kilometres away. The section on males jousting in mid-air is the highlight. Also worth noticing the Malay folk name, which hints at what people thought that laugh sounded like.

A short, affectionate history of the Cambridge room where the folk revival got a lot of its early practice. Dylan sneaking in between sets and old blues masters being brought north are the famous bits; the more charming one is how a gift shop slowly turned back into a stage.

Before anyone had a stored program, people were summing sine waves with pulleys and a wire to print a year of tides in under half an hour. It is a lovely piece of special-purpose hardware, and the American one, nicknamed Old Brass Brains, stayed in service into the 1960s.