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Last week, NASA announced it would study two different ways to pick up the samples the Perseverance rover is collecting on Mars and return them to Earth. Jeff Foust reports on the two approaches as well as interest by at least one company in an alternative.

When Ruth Neely France died in 1956 Cincinnati’s ink-stained wretches tumbled all over themselves to effusively memorialize Neely’s non-nonsense style and her outrageous adventures in the quest for a front-page headline. Some of the anecdotes were actually true. A few would have brought a smile to Neely’s face. In her day, she was not above a dash of hyperbole to keep her readers entranced.Did she really climb to the top …

I think, yup, I think the January 2025 RMC might be one of the best magazines I’ve bought so far. Ferry to Halifax. Quick walk. They close at six, I think, on a Monday. I’ve been so darn sick with... Read More ›

It’s some months since I read Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup, as she delivered the ST Lee Poicy Lecture here in Cambridge last November 11th, right after the US presidential election. Just a short time later, her warning looks even more prescient than it did on the day, as the American tech executives bend the knee at the court of Mar A Lago. Most of the book is a descriptive …

The unlikely connection between podcast studios, Renaissance libraries and man-caves.

In our first ‘Revolutionary Stuart Parliaments‘ article of 2025, Editor of the 1640-60 House of Lords section, Dr David Scott, considers the leading parliamentarian peer, Viscount Saye and Sele, and his relationship with the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. ‘The Warre was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any Armies’ concluded the renowned church leader Richard Baxter about the outbreak of the English Civil War in …

I’ve invoked the Flickr photos of Leo London a few times here. I don’t know the guy. I just happened upon his pics, at one point, and found several that spoke to my own NYC experience, and I’ve been raiding his collection ever since. Apropos of nothing, I was looking at them again and thought I’d re-circulate them. Both the one up top and the one below are Leo's. Presumably …

The death of photographer Oliviero Toscani was announced yesterday. To mark this news, we’re publishing a column I wrote for Creative Review in 2011, as the magazine he helped found, Colors, celebrated its 20th anniversary. Colors was an extraordinary piece of magazine publishing, bankrolled by Italian knitwear company Benetton and devised by Toscani, an Italian photographer/art director best known for his advertising work (in addition to Colors he also produced …

Alex Blechman? Ray Bradbury? Neal Stephenson? Mark Zuckerberg? Abe Murray? Anonymous? Depiction of a mysterious crystal sphere from Unsplash. Question for Quote Investigator: Science fiction is filled with cautionary fables and dystopian visions such as the murderous HAL 9000 computer of the movie “2001”, the relentless T-800 robot of the movie “The Terminator”, the disorienting cyberspace of the short story “Burning Chrome” by William Gibson, and the frenetic metaverse of …

Also known as gnocchetti dalla Valle D’Aosta, these teardrop dumplings (chnèfflènè) are a wonderful example of Italian mountain fare. They are made with a thick batter similar to spaetzle cooked in boiling salted water and dressed with onions sautéed in butter, wine and a little broth. A simple vegetarian recipe that takes little time to... The post Italian teardrop dumplings (chnèfflènè) appeared first on The Pasta Project.

Some highlights from a practice notebook of a schoolgirl. I use “delightful” sparingly but it is appropriate here. Some are full pages, two cropped. The notes indicate the booklet is for “History Maps, Agricultural Figures and Physiology Figures…and mind you, this wasn’t even handed in. They were produced from 1876-1877 by a young woman. A prize, and humbling. Note the map is likely not included, not required and not shown …

Back in the 1971, Herbert Simon (Nobel ’78) published an essay on the “attention economy.” It famously noted that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” He offered insights about how economic organizations (and people) needed mechanisms to receive and process large amounts of information, and then pass only the relevant portion of that information. (Simon won the Nobel prize “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process …

This is one of those cathartic blog posts. One in which I spent several frustrating hours trying to debug something that really should have just worked. Once I had finally found out what was going on I felt that I had to write it all down just in case someone else is out there dealing with the same issue. So if you have found yourself in a situation where using …

Accelerate is the empirical research behind books such as The Phoenix/Unicorn Project and (parts of) Software Engineering at Google. I loved it.

A followup to yesterday's article 'Why does this work?', with questions and answers and some references to folks from whom I have learned.