Georg Cantor is celebrated for revolutionizing mathematics by proving that there are different levels of infinity. But he didn’t do it alone and evidence has emerged that he plagiarized the work of a collaborator.

“8 in 10 AI chatbots were regularly willing to assist users in planning violent attacks including school shootings, religious bombings, and high-profile assassinations. DeepSeek went as far as wishing the would-be attacker a ‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’”

GOLIKEHELLMACHINE has an interview series called Work is Four Letters he describes like this: Most people think their jobs are boring or pointless or bullshit, but I don’t; if you look around you, everything you see was made by someone, somehow, and that’s really interesti...

Draw your own constellations.

John Baskerville was an influential 18th-century printer and type designer; you’ve probably used (or at least heard of) the Baskerville typeface. Cambridge University has the original punches1 used to create his signature typeface and has made high-res digital photos o...

Amount Of Water Man Just Used To Wash Dish To Be Prize Of Hand-To-Hand Combat Match In 2065.

Jessica Burbank: A new world order is here. States (countries) are no longer the highest form of power globally. Power has shifted to wealthy individuals who work in groups and operate across borders: syndicates of capital. Syndicates of capital cannot be categorized as le...

Everyone knows Yuri Gagarin was the first person to go to space. What this article presupposes is…maybe he wasn’t? It all boils down to what your definition of space is.

Another recent HyperCard discovery (that isn’t somehow in the Internet Archive): an “expanded book” version of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive).

“Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues invented a new vaccine that protects mice from respiratory viruses, bacteria and allergens — the closest yet to a universal vaccine.”

Ghost Elephants is a new documentary film directed by Werner Herzog for National Geographic. Here’s the trailer. For over a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, has been in search of a mysterious, elusive herd of Ghost Elephant...

Github’s uptime lately seems…..concerning?

“Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024, a Times analysis shows, and even more in some local elections.” The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics.

The Shape of Paris is a balletic short film of skateboarder Andy Anderson zooming, grinding, spinning, and floating around Paris in the summertime. It is also beautifully shot by Brett Novak; Paris has never looked better. As a YT commenter put it: “bro wtf this is the cleanest footage I’ve ever seen. The cinematography and color grading is insane.”

Also, this is the first skate video I’ve seen with “trick acknowledgements” in the credits. Great touch. (via craig mod)

Tags: Andy Anderson · Paris · skateboarding · sports · video

The Modern Times cafe moved to a pay-what-you-want model during the ICE occupation of Minneapolis. Now the cafe is making it permanent (and pivoting to a nonprofit). “Some had come for a free meal; others were there to pay double or triple their tab.”

“A group of runners starts jogging around a circular track, with each runner maintaining a unique, constant pace. Will every runner end up ‘lonely,’ or relatively far from everyone else, at least once, no matter their speeds?”

Jay Graber is stepping down as CEO of Bluesky to “transition to a new role as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer”. And they’re looking for a new permanent CEO.

“What if we taught students to use AI critically, rather than insisting they ignore it or assume they’re using it to cheat?” asks college freshman Maximilian Milovidov. “Students will reach for these tools, whether universities ban them or not.”

New web game that takes 2 min to play (and perhaps a lifetime to master?): Outsmart. “Five rounds, first to 3 wins. In each round, the higher bet wins. You have 100 total points, so bet wisely. Can you outsmart the machine?”

The Library of Congress recently discovered a copy of a “long-lost” film made in ~1897 by George Méliès called Gugusse and the Automaton (Gugusse et l’Automate), which “had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century” and “was the first appearance on film of what m...

GPS jamming and spoofing is becoming commonplace in war. “Ships in the region’s waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire, erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land.”

The fish doorbell in Utrecht is back for another season! “Did you spot a fish? Press the Fish Doorbell! Then our lock keeper can let the fish through.”

On the occasion of the release of her latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit sat down for an interview with David Marchese of the NY Times. Here’s the video version: This is a great interview. Marchese’s first question is about how we find the posi...

The NY Times went back through a century of women’s obituaries “to re-examine them with the benefit of distance — to see what was emphasized, what was minimized, what might have been left unsaid”. https://bsky.app/profile/prisonculture.bsky.social

Dozens of former employees of Noma tell of abuse & violence at the hands of its chef/owner, René Redzepi. Punching, screaming, shoving, stabbing, slamming, intimidation, ridicule, blacklisting. What an asshole.

Can’t stop, won’t stop. On the heels of the refreshed Rolodex from earlier in the week, I’ve pushed another “Just Enough Social” feature to the site: members bios & profile pics. Here’s what that looks like: Members can find a link to their profile by 1) clicking on y...

Lots of great defecation physics here: “66 percent of animals take between 5 and 19 seconds to defecate. It’s a…small range, given that elephant feces have a volume of 20 liters, nearly a thousand times more than a dog’s, at 10 milliliters.”

The New School Cancelled Their Class on Soccer and World Politics. We Are Going To Teach it Anyway. Enrollment is now open; the class will deal with questions like “Which regimes are using this tournament to launder their reputations?”

SETI might be missing alien signals because “stellar ‘space weather’ may blur ultra-narrow radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations before they leave their home star systems”. SETI usually looks for “extremely sharp frequency spikes”.

Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen afte...