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.