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Four Roman Pasta Dishes United by Cheese and Pepper
There are four traditional Roman pasta dishes, all made with Pecorino Romano - a strong sheep's milk cheese aged until it's firm enough to be grated. The most basic of the Roman pasta recipes is cacio e pepe (text recipe, video) using only cheese (cacio) and (e) black pepper (pepe). Add cured pork and you get pasta alla Gricia (text recipe, video). Add egg to alla Gricia to make Carbonara (text recipe, video); adding tomatoes and white wine (and in some recipes chili pepper or red pepper flakes) to alla Gricia instead of egg gives you pasta all'Amatriciana (text recipe, video). Recipes posted up front, but many more details below! [more inside]
Landing the Nostromo
To show where the Nostromo landed on LV-426, Ridley Scott needed onscreen visuals for the ship's computers. 20th Century Fox contacted Alan Sutcliffe at System Simulations in London, who hacked together some code that generated the vector landscape and computer interface using the Frolic graphics library running on a Prime 300 at SRC and rendered the animated sequence to film using a FR80 from III. Luckily for us digital archaeologists, Sutcliffe also wrote an article for Creative Computing a few years later describing his fourteen pages of FORTRAN that created the iconic view of the landing site terrain on an distant planet.
A New Form Of Life
A group of biologists based at Stanford has discovered a new form of life, unrelated to any known animal, plant, bacteria,
archea or virus. Known as obelisks, they consists of tiny circular fragments of
RNA, without a protein coating (like viruses have). These were discovered by computer-aided searching through tens of thousands of RNA sequences and according to the authors "they define the working limits of biological information transfer". Some of these live in the human gut, and their effect on health is yet unknown. Like viruses they are at the border of life and non-life, as they require a host organism to reproduce. It is not clear how they fit into the "Tree Of
Life". They may be remnants of a hypothesized "RNA World" which means they may pre-date DNA-based life. It's fascinating to me that these have been around for longer than us but we're just discovering them now. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” - and in your gut biome too.
Wikipedia article via John Baez on Mathstodon
the anglerfish
There Is No Safe Word. How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades. [Non-paywalled link.
Content warning: contains graphic descriptions of child abuse and sexual assault and emotional/sexual abuse.]
Content warning: contains graphic descriptions of child abuse and sexual assault and emotional/sexual abuse.]
"The form is one page long. No back. Just a front."
"Six People to Revise You" by J.R. Dawson, a short and moving science fiction story published January 2025 in Uncanny Magazine (available in text and audio), begins:
A parent or guardian
Someone who has known you since childhood
A mentor or teacher
An employer or coworker
A spouse, partner, or close intimate friend
Someone who does not consider themself a loved one
Not dead, just transcended.
Bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong
"In Hong Kong, skilled armies of scaffolders can erect enough bamboo to engulf a building in a day — even hours — using techniques that are thousands of years old, and have been passed down through generations."
Society to Advocate for the Return of Intermissions in Movies
FANFARE THIS WEEK... New movies: everyone's Criterion Closet buddy Pamela Anderson stuns in The Last Showgirl; "Holocaust tours, with lunch" in A Real Pain; a Hungarian-born architect immigrates to the US in bladder-busting 215 minute epic The Brutalist; running, quips in hit sequel Sonic the Hedgehog 3; a biopic of UK pop star Robbie Williams with a CGI chimp in the title role in Better Man; Sean Wang's critically acclaimed coming-of-age dramedy Dìdi; and dead-eyed Philomena Cunk asks the worst possible questions in Cunk on Life. And, in TV: Star Wars spinoff Skeleton Crew; post-apocalypse drama/mystery Silo; the serial-killer-in-his-youth prequel series Dexter: Original Sin; Netflix's buzzy new western American Primeval; post-COVID ER dramaThe Pitt; and the highly anticipated Abbott Elementary/It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia crossover. [more inside]
Cynicism is the cheap seats.
We Don't Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.
"Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed. But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth."
all that glisters should probably be denominated waaaaay smaller
In Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’, historical blogger Bret Devereaux takes a dive into historical coinage and accounting to explain why, when you get down to it, Dungeons & Dragons and most other historical/fantasy RPG settings are out of their goddam minds if they think people were lugging gold coins around on a daily basis.
Finally, an actually useful function for home security cameras.
Of Autocrats and the Media
For many, Hungary’s Victor Orban is the contemporary patron saint of autocratic rule. Certainly, he leaves “little doubt over what his model calls for,” A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times noted in a Washington Post op-ed this fall citing, “loud applause from attendees of a Republican political conference held in Budapest in 2022,” when Orban said, “Dear friends: We must have our own media.” [more inside]
Habit-forming for good with Finch
Is there something you can do on your phone that's the opposite of doom-scrolling? It would probably need to be cute and encouraging and maybe it somehow allows friends to support each other... That's basically what Finch is trying to do. Sadly, their own website provides very little information about what using the app is like, so I've selected some reviews to give you an idea. [more inside]
"Really?"
WEST-OF-HOUSE “West of House”
The Visible Zorker – Play Zork in one pane and follow the original ZIL source code and state of the virtual machine in adjacent panes as you play. (Or just read Andrew Plotkin's article about making this visualization.)
"Where did those ten years go?"
"But nobody gets it. Most mental-health professionals, in my experience, don’t really understand compassion fatigue or caregiver burnout or chronic stress disorders. They just see that on the surface you look like you’re fine because that’s how you get accustomed to functioning. And you don’t get any validation when you’re having a really bad day. "
Eleven people share about their experiences caring for family members. (Archive link)
"wet and full of life"
Two short speculative stories in which pairs of women figure out some things about their relationships. "Twenty Thousand Last Meals on an Exploding Station" by Ann LeBlanc, published 2021 in Mermaids Monthly: "Riles Yalten has approximately thirty minutes before she dies, and that’s just enough time to try the new gravlax place on level sixteen." "The Freedom to Decide" by W. L. Bolm, published Nov. 2024 in Small Wonders: "Thus begins an audit of all the little kindnesses each had attributed to the other." (Disclaimer: Bolm is a friend.)
Lucrative tools for converting anxiety into income
We need to talk about the doomers and the attention economy they’ve built. Not because they’re entirely wrong — from climate change to political extremism, a lot of their concerns are valid — but because they’ve created something extraordinary: a perpetual motion machine powered by anxiety. Let’s call it the Doomscroll Industrial Complex (DIC). It operates on a simple principle: bad news is good business. But unlike traditional doom-peddlers who simply predicted the end times and waited to be proven right or wrong, today’s digital prophets have discovered a much more sustainable model. from How Anxiety Became a Business Model [Joan Westenberg] [more inside]
Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution.
As many as two billion people suffer from chronic pain, can science finally bring us relief? [NYT / Archive]
“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power”
I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before. from US President Joe Biden's final speech. [more inside]