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Please join me in wishing a happy 10th birthday to box enthusiast and internet sensation, Maru the Scottish Fold cat. (Maru, previously: 1, 2) [SLYT]
posted by Room 641-A at 7:58 PM PST - 55 comments

Denis Johnson, Who Wrote of the Failed and the Desperate, Dies at 67 [The New York Times] “Denis Johnson, a National Book Award winner whose novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose, died on Wednesday at his home in Gualala, Calif. He was 67. The cause was liver cancer, his literary agent Nicole Aragi said.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:46 PM PST - 27 comments

The gentleman waiting gave him a start, though all he was doing was sitting still by the cold fireplace. Perhaps it was his dæmon, a beautiful silvery spotted leopard, or perhaps it was his dark, saturnine expression; in any event, Malcolm felt daunted, and very young and small. His dæmon, Asta, became a moth.
posted by Bee'sWing at 6:22 PM PST - 17 comments

A small dog chewed the corner of conradcourtney's 1950 Saruk rug, so s/he set to fixin' it. (Slimgur) Here's a YouTube channel of a rug repair shop from British Columbia. Wikipedia's Oriental rugs article is great .
posted by growabrain at 5:53 PM PST - 11 comments

Steven Soderbergh's back from 'retirement' with Lucky Logan (slyt)
posted by octothorpe at 4:07 PM PST - 24 comments

Baltimore, 15 years after The Wire [more inside]
posted by arcticseal at 8:52 AM PST - 31 comments

"Of 513 school districts in Oklahoma, 96 have lopped Fridays or Mondays off their schedules — nearly triple the number in 2015 and four times as many as in 2013. An additional 44 are considering cutting instructional days by moving to a four-day week in the fall or by shortening the school year." The 2018 state budget, which was sent to Governor Fallin this week, cuts $34 million from education. Here is Oklahoma's study: Analysis of Expenditures of Districts on a Four-Day School Week (PDF)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:53 AM PST - 91 comments

Fresh translations of samurai accounts of the arrival of a “barbarian” ship near the Japanese town of Mugi have confirmed the legend of an Australian convict pirate ship visiting Japan in 1830. [more inside]
posted by acb at 5:36 AM PST - 21 comments

Need something to read on a Sunday? The story of Codes and Codebreakers in World War I is an interesting little chapter which is still less-known than the famous codebreaking effort of WWII. Maybe you're intrigued and want to read the whole online book, Codes, Ciphers and Codebreaking, or, if codes aren't your thing, maybe A History of the Telescope or Missions to the Planets or Elementary Chemistry or any of the other on Greg Goebel's Vectors site - dedicated to educational writings on science, technology, and history.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:38 AM PST - 7 comments

Lessons from AlphaGo: Storytelling, bias and program management "Over the past few days, AlphaGo has taken the world by storm once again. Over a week in Wuzhen, it beat the worlds’ best player Ke Jie three times, a team of players from China, and finally lost a game (unavoidable, since it played against itself in a human pair-go match) ... In fact, the most interesting reveal happened only after the match, and that is when DeepMind released the first set of self-play games where AlphaGo played itself (similar to how it is trained in order to improved the AI). Those games were surprisingly non-human, so much so that it is not clear at a glance if the average human go player can learn anything from them. "
posted by dhruva at 4:37 AM PST - 29 comments

This application generates a random medieval city layout of a requested size. The generation method is rather arbitrary, the goal is to produce a nice looking map, not an accurate model of a city.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:13 AM PST - 24 comments