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.