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.