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Over the years, Donald E. Knuth has produced a slew of bestsellers on topics that might seem to have only limited appeal, most notably the arts of computer programming and mathematical typography. His latest book takes on a subject so challenging it has to hide behind a coy title: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. What is this subject that dare not speak...

No, in the Marvel Universe, Hitler did not die by suicide. He died by being burned alive by the original Human Torch. Though they did Save Hitler's Brain, as Maxwell Yezpitelok's article also explains. (Title taken from Maxwell's skeet about it).

The idea of men who need new stories but refuse to read them is also exaggerated and hyperbolic. It has become its own kind of story. It's a legend, one that's been repeated for years, haunted by zombie statistics and dubious facts. Its continued flourishing says a lot about what our culture worries about and all the things we hope will heal us. from...

Woman allegedly found with 94 reptiles in wildlife trafficking crackdown. Operation Ares leads to the arrest of a 26-year-old woman from Ashfield, Sydney who allegedly tried to export 94 live native reptiles to Hong Kong over a period of four weeks.Authorities allegedly intercepted international mail packages containing 19 blue-tongue lizards bound for China. The lizards were found stuffed in boxes with footwear, travel coffee...

Great snakes! Blow me down! I'm about a week late, but there's still time to make a game for Gaming Like It's 1929, the public domain adaptation game jam! (Techdirt articles one and two, previously (with links to all previous jams and their submissions and winners))Obligatory Public Domain Day articles: Duke (previously), Copyright Lately. Turns out you CAN use that non-pipe, but possibly only...

Keith Jarrett on piano, Gary Peacock on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums have been one of the longest running jazz groups ever. ... Jarrett's aim was to reconnect with the "tribal language" of jazz and to investigate the "non-possessive" side of music making. Apart from a couple of studio visits, the trio has mostly worked live, and significantly, they don't use arrangements. Arrangements...

Digital technology is changing the very face of archival materials, as there emerges a new generation of authors who've never known what it's like to pound out a book on a typewriter or scribble one out longhand.

The Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association (PCPSPA) is currently on an unfair labor practices strike at Park City Mountain Resort (PCMR), the largest ski resort in the US. It has resulted in significant disruption. People are upset, the lines are long, terrain is limited, and Park City's owner, Vail Resorts, is getting a beating in the markets.It's a mess. But the impact of...

In the 1930s, several Japanese companies produced films made on paper ("kami firumu") instead of celluloid. The Japanese Paper Film Project preserves the surviving movies and promotes scholarship about these films. [via]

"In Robert Eggers's new film "Nosferatu" (2024), Nosferatu is the dark Count Orlok, whom the socially alienated young Ellen summons as spiritual company, and the force her older, betrothed self must confront, navigating both attraction and repulsion."Just saw Nosferatu and immediately went looking for reviews and commentary. This is interesting, but FYI spoilers abound.

The Network Of Time is a kind of six degrees of separation (or of Kevin Bacon, if you like) for a growing database of portrait photographs.Original Oracle of Kevin Bacon post from 2001!

Transnistria (previously), a tiny breakaway region of Moldova beside Ukraine, has for more than 30 years stood apart, with support from Russian troops. As of January 1, Russia cut off natural gas passing through Ukraine to the West, affecting Transnistria, dependent on the Russian gas: Gas Cutoff Sends Shivers Through a Russian-Backed Breakaway Region (NYTimes gift link). Slava Malamud, originally from Transnistria, writes about...

On May 25, 1985, a hometown girl returned to Detroit to put on a show."I went to New York. I had a dream. I wanted to be a big star, I didn't know anybody, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, I wanted to do all those things, I wanted to make people happy, I wanted to be famous, I wanted everybody to...

Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. At the end of a trying 2024, here's what they had to say: Predictions for Journalism, 2025. [Nieman Lab]

Moonlight on Roseville Beach is a roleplaying game about a very specific time and a very specific place, but that specificity makes it extremely relevant to the modern world, and the time in which it has been published. The game is set in a resort town with a primarily LGBTQIA+ population, in a region that is deeply enmeshed with the supernatural. When supernatural effects...

Even in the few months Kelly has used the app, she's noticed an increase in straight men who don't seem to be interested in actual kink and are just there because they think it's a place to find easy sex: "I saw a man's profile once that said, 'Here when my libido requires it, otherwise happy on [members-only dating app] Raya.'" To try and...

"Even if we have things in common — and we often have — we rarely communicate directly. Over time we're gaslighted into believing these shared elements aren't that important, maybe they don't even exist... our common history is erased as we submit to the default, US-centric one. There are many examples of this — one of the most common is how Europe's home computer...

Biocubes.net is an interactive visualization of the world's biomass and humanity's "technomass" (i.e. everything we've ever built) (via kottke)

You've probably heard of the Royal Game of Ur, but have you played the Game of Twenty?Both are backgammon-like games played on a board with twenty squares -- and they're both still fun to play, millennia later. Sets and pieces for these and similar games have been found at sites around the Mediterranean, dating as far back as 2600 BCE. Researchers at the Sharh-i-Sokhta...

Reviewing books by two of the world's leading psychoanalytic writers, Christian R. Gelder explores the challenge that psychoanalysis poses not only to conventional understandings of self and sex, but also to the prevailing therapeutic culture.