But like many an inarticulate young lover, I thought for a time that seduction was a matter of giving the right book to the right woman. In my case it was Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: a meditation on Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther that catalogues the melancholic lover’s prized ‘image repertoire’ – the scene of waiting, the feeling of being dissolved in the presence of the loved being, the attraction of suicide – and thinly veils the author’s own life as a middle-aged gay man in Paris in the 1970s. This gift was always a prelude to disaster.

– RB and Me: An Education is an essay by Brian G. Dillon about his relationship with the books of French philosopher Roland Barthes. It's also a lovely autobiography of an awkward boy finding his place in life. Dillon's website collects his essays, and is trove of interesting insight. Besides writing essays and fiction, Dillon is also the UK editor of Cabinet Magazine, and you can read a fair number of his articles online, including ones on Beau Brummel and the cravat, hypochondria and hydrotherapy.
posted by Kattullus on Dec 1, 2011 - 4 comments

Tabletop: Analog Game Design - A commons licenced book containing a series of essays about digital and non-digital games from some esteemed boardgame veterans: "Much has been written about the videogame revolution, [...] In a scant thirty some-odd years, we’ve grown from nothing to one of the world’s largest entertainment forms, grossing tens of billions annually [...] Works that discuss the evolution of the game industry from an historical perspective generally talk about the connection between the pre-digital arcade and the earliest digital games; I’ve even heard some claim that “without the arcade, videogames would not exist.” This is, of course, bosh..." [more inside]
posted by Cogentesque on Aug 24, 2011 - 36 comments

Russel Cox, one of the people behind Google's new programming language Go, has written a three part series on regular expressions. It's a nice mix of computer science theory, programming, and history: Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach, and Regular Expression Matching in the Wild.
posted by chunking express on Mar 17, 2010 - 57 comments

"Ontologiam seu scientiam de Aliquo et Nihilo, Ente et Non ente, Re et modo rei, Substantia et Accidente." - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). [more inside]
posted by ageispolis on Jan 12, 2010 - 18 comments

Paul Romer: A Theory of History, with an Application - "His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules." (previously, via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jul 3, 2009 - 11 comments

i began cataloging the colors, and put the color list on the web. over time, the paint catalog turned into a web site.
posted by ijoshua on Jun 27, 2006 - 7 comments

The Dolmetsch online music theory & history pages - short introductions to the whole of the how and why of Western music, with enough links to fill in any gaps. Amazingly good, although as yet incomplete. via haddock
posted by thatwhichfalls on Aug 11, 2004 - 5 comments

The Virtual Colour Museum presents Colour Order Systems in Art and Science: "a complete cultural history of colour", including illustrated explanations of 59 colour theories from antiquity to modern time, plus the significance of colours in various cultural systems (click the small images to enlarge), and a "virtual colour-space" dedicated to illustrating the spherical colour system construction of early 19th century painter Philipp Otto Runge. Walk this way >>
posted by taz on Nov 9, 2003 - 4 comments