Surprising

The M/M/c model may not behave like you expect. I have a system with c servers, each of which can only handle a single concurrent request, and has no internal queuing. The servers sit behind a load balancer, which contains … Read more

During the Soviet era, the location – on the outskirts of Moscow – was a guarded military installation, access to which was highly restricted. According to Nasa astronaut Michael Barratt, speaking in 1998: “Star City has always kind of felt … Read more

Rituals come in many different forms and are practised in cultures the world over, but why have they become such an important part of our lives? When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski visited the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea in … Read more

There is a rumor continuously circulating that we’re owned by Google, which of course couldn’t be farther from the truth. I was actually a witness in the U.S. v. Google trial for the DOJ. I think this rumor started because … Read more

Explore You might’ve been told to “hang in there” throughout your childhood, as illustrated by a kitten dangling from a rope. But it turns out that quitting might often be your healthiest option. Researchers have long sought to understand how … Read more

So how hard could it be. As input we have something like Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07 in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 … Read more

Gustav Klimt made gold modern. At the turn of the 20th century, the Viennese artist captivated public attention with his sinuous depictions of women (and occasionally men) which he adorned with copious amounts of gold leaf. These visions—which were sensual … Read more

Early analysis of the asteroid Bennu sample returned by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has revealed dust rich in carbon, nitrogen, and organic compounds, all of which are essential components for life as we know it. Dominated by clay minerals, particularly serpentine, … Read more