Take away the edges of the board and chess starts producing positions that feel like Zeno's paradoxes in a cardigan. Here Black escapes mate by flinging a rook arbitrarily far away, and is doomed anyway by a patient chase that never quite ends. A lovely little puzzle about what 'eventually' means.

In a species this rare, every calf gets counted by name, so one that slipped through the winter surveys entirely is genuinely good news. The detective work is the fun part: matching photos against the catalogue the New England Aquarium keeps on every known animal. A small, cheering correction to the numbers.

A port born from two brothers wanting to race each other again twenty years on, which is about the best reason to do something this ambitious. The game's own code was recompiled for the browser, with online races, widescreen and wheel support thrown in, and the author keeps it free with no paid perks. Hacker News filler, but the good kind.

A snake with no limbs that nonetheless does cartwheels, at four times its slithering speed, is the sort of fact that justifies a whole afternoon of reading. The underlying paper in Current Biology looks at how it keeps its head steady while the rest of it tumbles. Predators, one imagines, are mostly too confused to follow.

A tiny numerical curiosity that ties the permutations of 1, 2 and 3 to the first digits of pi with the same total, and it is entirely a coincidence. Dudley collected these to show how easily patterns appear when you go looking. A pleasant thing to check on the back of an envelope.

Set a pair of compasses, draw on a sheet of paper, then draw on a ball without touching the setting: the flat disk and the curved cap come out exactly equal in area. It sounds like it shouldn't work, which is the whole fun. Archimedes would nod; the rest of us reach for a pencil.

IBM built a custom supercomputer for this, and the suggestion is that better algorithms could have done it on a nice desktop from about 1995. Nothing says more about where the gains went than that. Nobody can rerun the match without a time machine, so enjoy it as a measure of what thirty years of search heuristics are worth, and not as a verdict.

Two brothers shared one keyboard as kids, and one of them never let go of the idea of flying as actual wingmen. The method is lovely old-school memory archaeology: strip space of everything, snapshot RAM in DOSBox, fly straight, see what changed. A decade is a reasonable schedule for a childhood promise.

In 1992 a German art student took the back-to-nature fantasy to its logical aisle. The best detail is the cashier, who rang up his kills with total indifference. Performance art rarely gets a better review than that.

Alcuin's little book is the ancestor of every wolf, goat and cabbage you ever met, compiled to sharpen young minds at the court of Charlemagne. This one is a tidy bit of state-space search, a thousand years before anyone called it that. Try it before clicking for the answer.

A bird blog explains a change you have probably noticed without noticing: the bug cloud around the outdoor light is gone. The explanation is tidy, and the geckos give it a small food-chain punchline. Take the moonlight navigation account as one reading of why insects circle lamps, then go and look at your own porch.

Our occasional computing history slot goes to Ken Shirriff, who treats old avionics the way other people treat cathedrals. Five general-purpose computers ran the Shuttle at 420,000 instructions per second on magnetic core, and the I/O box is the half that rarely gets the attention. Flight software fans will want to see the iron it actually ran on.

Terence Eden goes looking for lorem ipsum on British public sector sites and comes back with something close to archaeology. Test users named Alice and Henry, pages nobody dares delete, stubs that lead to forgotten functions. He is at pains not to point and laugh, which only makes it funnier, and every sysadmin will recognise the load-bearing placeholder.

Rob Thomson and William Palmer proposed to strip English poetry of feeling and modernise it, starting with Wordsworth's solitary reaper. They appear to have stopped at the first verse, and the world's literature breathed out. Futility Closet supplies the deadpan, which is the only way to serve this.

Technology on film is usually two people typing on one keyboard, so it's a small marvel that ham radio has fared rather well. The roll call runs from Hancock's gloriously inept operator to the real radio amateur who overheard a London bank job. And yes, Principal Skinner holds a licence, which explains a good deal.

A proper counterfactual for anyone who remembers those matches: all that custom silicon against a beige box and thirty years of better ideas. The answer flatters the software and stings the hardware budget. Worth reading for what it says about how much search and evaluation have improved, with the machine held fixed.

Science mislaid it for the better part of a century; the people living on the island did not. A venomous primate is odd enough already, and this one comes from just down the road by Penang standards. There's still a threats section, but the headline act is survival.

An archive story wearing a dance-music jacket: a DJ finds a tape the duo mailed him after Homework, it is in poor shape, and a specialist brings it back. There is a small thrill in possibly being among the first to hear it in nearly thirty years. Folk it is not, but the instinct to rescue a recording is the same one.

Few scientific reputations have been so thoroughly vaporised at room temperature. Quanta's writer comes back to it by way of philosopher Huw Price, who argues scientists may have been too risk-averse about it. Whatever you think of the physics, it is a good case study in how a field decides a question is closed.

An integer sequence encyclopedia throwing a party and giving out prizes is peak delightful small community. The headline winner is about buildings that can see a number of earlier buildings equal to their own height, which you can explain at a dinner party and then be unable to stop thinking about. The judges' one-line citations are half the pleasure.

A nineteenth-century physicist deciding that the way to test the aurora was to rig up a mountain is pure Victorian-scale ambition. BLDGBLOG treats it as landscape architecture, which is the right lens. Birkeland fans will feel a familiar tingle.