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Great Dirhombicosidodecahedron
| | Great Dirhombicosidodecahedron ("Miller's Monster") | - Vertex description: (5/2.4.3.4.5/3.4.3/2.4)/2 - Faces: 124 (24 pentagrams, 40 triangles, 60 squares) - Edges: 240 - Vertices: 60 - External facelets: 1280 - Dual: Great Dirhombicosidodecacron This model has 1280 external facelets to put together! The polyhedron is uniform, so all the faces are regular although it's hard to make them all out. It is the only uniform polyhedron with as many as 8 faces meeting at each vertex (two purple pen
2 min · 471 words
A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal
Allison Marsh traces how Michael Bloomberg's Market Master grew from a monochrome Merrill Lynch terminal into the Bloomberg Terminal—keyboards, hot keys, private networks, and museum artifacts of financial computing.
7 min · 1,562 words
Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
Marcin Wichary photographs modular industrial control dashboards in German and Polish museums—air traffic, subway, railway, and power-plant panels as physical design systems that software later replaced.
1 min · 320 words
Reverse Engineering NovaLogic's Comanche Terrain Maps
A detailed reverse-engineering walkthrough of Comanche: Maximum Overkill MS-DOS terrain/map files—how NovaLogic packed heightmaps and related data, and how to reconstruct the landscapes.
16 min · 3,693 words
Coltrane's Tone CircleExploring the circle of fifths, its jazz applications, and Coltrane's geometric approach to harmony
A clear walkthrough of John Coltrane’s famous tone-circle sketch: the circle of fifths, geometric harmony, and how jazz musicians still use the diagram today.
11 min · 2,485 words
Ben Sixsmith argues that strange times make it necessary to take strange people seriously—from rocket pioneer Jack Parsons to today's eccentric AI-and-tech scenes—and why the future may belong to the weird.
3 min · 764 words
Mass Fraction: a love letter to Deuteros, in sixteen colours
Arda Karaduman launches Mass Fraction, a hard-SF space-industry strategy game at 640×512 in sixteen colours—mapping Deuteros and Millennium 2.2 into a Godot sim of Lid debris, named crews with dose ledgers, and indifferent Harrow machines.
5 min · 1,252 wordsagent-assisted
Historians often blame drought, famine, and invaders for the Late Bronze Age collapse—but that can’t explain why the empires never came back. Patrick Fitzsimmons argues for a deeper structural story.
14 min · 3,253 words
How Delhi Cut Electricity Loss from 50 to 5 PercentHere’s How Delhi Achieved Its Epic Power-Grid Fix
IEEE Spectrum's Mini Shaji Thomas recounts how Delhi slashed electricity losses from about 50% to 5%—the privatization, metering, and grid-operations reforms that turned candlelit kitchens into reliable power.
15 min · 3,457 words
Pirating the PiratesNotes from the underground of film preservation.
Devan Scott on how fan restorers, remuxers, and boutique labels like Arrow and Kino fight studio revisionism—reconstructing historically accurate cuts of films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when official releases fail.
3 min · 760 words
Owed a billion dollars in NVDA stock
A first-person account of a 1993 NVIDIA stock option grant, a decades-later discovery of a vesting discrepancy, and how the statute of limitations settled it.
3 min · 779 words
What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators
Ben Overmyer compares Western heraldry and Japanese mon as generative systems—and what those rule-bound visual languages teach about building software that invents coherent coats of arms and marks.
13 min · 3,070 words
Reverse-engineering the vintage Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087's tangent microcode and shows why the chip's approach goes beyond classic CORDIC—covering range reduction, the argument reduction trick, and what the die reveals about 1980s floating-point design.
32 min · 7,343 words
Tupi: rebuilding 1554 in the browser with 32 AI agents
How Ruben Marcus rebuilt a 1554 Tupinambá canoe raid as real-time 3D in the browser with Claude Opus 5.5, three.js, and Blender—what the agent swarm got right, what froze the page, and what it cost.
8 min · 1,950 words
Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
In 2011, Apple released the Cards app. The app — which required iOS 5 — let you design custom letterpress cards, with your messages and photos printed upon them — which Apple would ship to your recipient on your behalf. I recently learned the origin story of Cards, and that it was specifically a Steve Jobs product. It also wasn’t smooth sailing. But first, some backstory, and inserting myself into the narrative, because it’s my site and I can do what I want here.
6 min · 1,445 words
Ten Lines Of Code That Changed My World
Roel Nieskens picks ten short snippets—from BASIC hello-world loops to JavaScript wat Batman and typography hacks—that shaped how he thinks about programming, fronts-ends, and fonts.
3 min · 689 words
C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
Gustavo Pezzi defends C’s platform-sized integers: how 12–60-bit machines shaped int, why minimum ranges beat fixed widths, and what Lua’s portable C still teaches.
2 min · 486 words
Marcos Magueta borrows a Roman naming practice to argue for clearer software names—how ancient cognomina habits map onto naming libraries, products, and the stories we tell about code.
5 min · 1,232 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
AI labs need to start funding historical research
Res Obscura argues frontier labs should fund historical scholarship, using alchemical correspondence and early modern sources as a case for AI-assisted discovery.
14 min · 3,217 words