JavaScript can’t be fixed

In 2015, Andreas Rossberg of the V8 team proposed making JavaScript a little saner by making classes, objects, and functions unalterable after their construction so that a sound type system becomes possible.

A year later, his team reported on their progress and said that there’s basically no way to do that without breaking compatibility with everything that came before.

Any sound type system that’s compatible with old code will have to admit that JavaScript “functions” really aren’t and will have to model a lot more of JavaScript’s insanity.

 

A whale-eating whale

The Basilosaurus is not, as its name suggests, a lizard, but a prehistoric cetacean, a mammal.  It grew up to 60 feet long (18 m).  It could bite with a force of 3,600 pounds per square inch (25,000 kPa), chewing and then swallowing its food.

The Gnostic Brotherhood of Mathematicians

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-mathematical-community

3D printed cam system for drawing pictures with a laser

Bob Pepper’s Dragonmaster Cards

I got these cards for my birthday one year in the early 80s. We didn’t play the game very much—it was too hard for me as a little kid, and I was the oldest of my siblings—but I was always impressed by the art work and would pull them out just to look at them

https://www.google.com/amp/s/2warpstoneptune.com/2014/05/09/complete-set-of-bob-peppers-dragonmaster-cards-1981/amp/