Futility Closet

> I read about Huffman’s Pyramid from the consistently excellent blog Futility Closet. Yes, I can also recommend Futility Closet for HN readers. https://www.futilitycloset.com

So this probably isn't quite what you're looking for, but my favourite podcast discovery in 2019 was Off Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast. Each week Jess McKenna, Zach Reino, and their band are joined by a special guest and together they improvised an entire hour-long musical from scratch without anything prepared ahead of time, including the music. It's just utterly remarkable how good and clever and funny it is given it's entirely improvised and off the cuff. In my opinion it's one of the most astonishing demonstrations of human creativity I've ever seen, and it's doubly impressive when you remember they do it every single week and still never run out of ideas. http://www.earwolf.com/show/off-book/ I would also HIGHLY recommend the Futility Closet podcast and website. The podcast is described as "forgotten stories from the pages of history" but it's so much more than that, and so is the website. Anyone who enjoys logic puzzles, mathematics, chess, history, old books, and interesting stories will love it. https://futilitycloset.com https://futilitycloset.com/podcast/

Herb Simon certainly was great, but it is weird that the site uses a picture of what is obviously (despite his face being cut off) Claude Shannon working on his robotic mouse Theseus. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/08/23/shannons-mouse/

The wonderful historical podcast Futility Closet did a great episode about Ruth Belville, which went some way to explaining her business model and how it still worked with technological advancements. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2016/06/06/podcast-episode-108-greenwic… I found it initially while looking for the Citation Needed episode from The Technical Difficulties, which is less informed, but quite fun. https://youtu.be/RzfiF9ccZvQ

There’s a great episode of the Futility Closet podcast about the Doves Type and the dispute that lead to it being dumped into the Thames: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-168-destruct…

The Futility Closet did a brilliant podcast 'featuring “forgotten stories from the pages of history” — surprising and curious tales from the past.'. I think it stopped because of health issues. But it is well worth checking out: https://www.futilitycloset.com/podcast/

The Futility Closet is a chef's kiss: https://www.futilitycloset.com/

Futility Closet is always interesting and/or amusing. https://www.futilitycloset.com/

https://www.futilitycloset.com/ “Futility Closet is a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible.” The podcast is good too!

This was recently covered on the excellent (and my personal favourite) podcast Futility Closet https://www.futilitycloset.com/2021/01/11/podcast-episode-327-the-misp… It seems to predate the linked article by about a month.

I'll also link my favorite podcast who just did a piece on this. They probably have some different details and anecdotes than OP article. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/04/16/podcast-episode-196-the-long…

Almost certainly Greg Ross's "Futility Closet". http://www.futilitycloset.com/ [EDITED to be less diffident -- I'm at least 95% confident this is what you're thinking of.]

Regarding the problems to pronounce words easily: These two poems resonate strongly with me and seem to be related to what the author describes: 1: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2007/08/30/ough/ 2: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/09/19/o-u-g-h/ Yes, english between non-english speakers works quite well. Listening to UK english (especially accents. The TV series Misfits was funny not only because of the weird story..) is hard, following people from the US is easier but still full of traps. I'm confident that I have a huge number of 'english' words in my vocabulary that I never pronounced right (only read them, trying to pronounce them by guessing. See the poems..) in my whole life.

I very much enjoy this form of mathematics trivia and similarly interesting toy maths problems. They're often posted at http://www.futilitycloset.com - not just interesting numbers, but interesting geometric proofs and so on.

If you think Babbage had no distractions you know little of Mr Babbage : Organ grinders .... the worst of the "thousand nuisances that made it impossible for the householder to enjoy any quiet" .... such "instruments of torture" had cost him a quarter of his working life. At one point he tallied 165 nuisances in 90 days. his 1871 obituary in the London Times notes that he lived to be almost 80 "in spite of organ-grinding persecutions." http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/04/14/quiet/ Because of his campaigns against street music, buskers deliberately turned up at his lodgings to annoy him, even following him down the street.

I found this via Futility Closet, which a constant source of really interesting stuff. (http://www.futilitycloset.com/) Initially, I thought it's too good to be true, later found references in Wikipedia and Mathworld, and finally started to believe in it.

Oh, then you will really love and want to fuck the name of the "Wave Function Collapse" algorithm! (Maybe Chuck Tingle will write a book about it.) Also "Extreme Learning Machines", "Reservoir Computing", "Liquid State Machines", and "Crab Computing" (I shit you not)! Don't even get me started on "Moveable Feast Machines". [Welcome to Coffee Talk, with Linda Richman. Todays topic: Wave Function Collapse is neither quantum physics, particles, waves, nor collapsing functions. Discuss amongst yourselves, while I am constrained to solve all these Sudoko puzzles. Oh, I am so verklempt!] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42749675 DonHopkins 6 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Generating an infinite world with the Wave Functio... Ha ha, great comment! You're right, WFC's name just refers to quantum mechanics because it sounds cool, not because the algorithm has anything to do with physics, waves, or collapsing functions (it's more just a constraint based Sudoko solver). But I perceive it more as a playful buzzword for a useful algorithm, and not as maliciously deceptive like Deepak Chopra, who I was just commenting on recently (Quantum was cool until Deepak Chopra ruined it for everybody): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42714477 I do think it's useful combined with other techniques like procedural programming, cellular automata, Voronoi diagrams / jump flooding, noise, etc, to steer the higher and lower level structures. Check out Maxim Gumin's work on…

Just realized that the "blogs" category in my Feedly has 347 entries in it, and about half of them haven't published in more than 3 months. Here are some that are prolific and good: https://marginalrevolution.com/ Marginal Revolution: wide-ranging and prolific blog about economics and culture. https://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com Anecdotal Evidence: well-written personal blog, mostly observations on books. https://krebsonsecurity.com/ Krebs on Security: about information security. It's written for a popular audience, which is about the level at which I understand the subject. https://mjtsai.com/blog/ Michael Tsai: collects quotes from other people about ongoing software-related news. https://acquisitiontalk.com Acquisition Talk: about weapons system acquisition, government procurement, etc. Something I wanted to follow because it's a huge sector that doesn't get a lot of attention. https://www.futilitycloset.com/ Futility Closet: wunderkammer-style blog with historical miscellany, quotes, puzzles, etc. Also a great podcast. https://www.tor.com/tag/jo-walton-reads/ Jo Walton's Reading List: Not strictly a blog, but it's in my RSS feeds. I like to see what she's reading lately, and sometimes I get good recommendations from her (e.g. KJ Parker). https://www.bldgblog.com/ BLDGBLOG: about design, architecture, etc. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/ Colossal: about art and design. https://www.subtraction.com/ Subtraction: about design

Anyone have recommendations for learning about mechanical linkages (books/MOOC/other)? Recently I've been intrigued by things like straight line linkages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaucellier%E2%80%93Lipkin_linkage ...and the Chebyshev "paradoxical" linkage: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/01/03/chebyshevs-paradoxical-mecha… ...and of course Kempe's "universality theorem", that there is a linkage that traces any polynomial curve. https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.09002 I recently came across "Planar Linkages Following a Prescribed Motion": https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.05623 ...which looks awesome. Especially intriguing are sentences like: "In modern terms, the procedure proposed by Kempe is a parsing algorithm. It takes the defining polynomial of a plane curve as input and realizes arithmetic operations via certain elementary linkages. In this work, we approach the question from a different perspective... ...By encoding motions via polynomials over a noncommutative algebra, we reduce this task to a factorization problem." But currently the terminology used is considerably over my head. Anyone know what branches of math you should study to be able to understand things like: "...we recall that one can embed SE2 as an open subset of a real projective space. This allows us to introduce a noncommutative algebra K whose multiplication corresponds to the group operation in SE2, hence mimicking the role played by dual quaternions with respect to SE3. A polynomial…

futility closet http://futilitycloset.com

This was the explanation for why the scotch and soda diet doesn't work: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2008/11/16/the-mensa-diet/ (If the nutritional calories in the drink had been only the same number of thermodynamic calories, the drink would have been energetically negative for the body because of its low temperature.)

Haven't yet given this a proper read, but was motivated to find it after stumbling upon this (H/T to The Morning News newsletter): https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/08/08/and-theyre-off/ Unusual names of racehorses, collected by Paul Dickson in What’s in a Name?, 1996: Bates Motel Disco Inferno Up Your Assets Race Horse Crashing Bore English Muffin Leo Pity Me Cold Shower T.V. Doubletalk Ranikaboo Holy Cats Hadn’t Orter Strong Strong Honeybunny Boo

In general I find commentary here too negative on AI, but I'm a bit squeamish about maximalist claims re: AI mathematical reasoning vs. human population based off this, even setting aside lottery-ticket-hypothesis-like concerns. It's a common logic puzzle, Google can't turn up an exact match to the wording you have, but ex. here: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/03/03/three-hat-problem/

Here's a previous HN submission about finding Waldo in pi (spoiler: only by cheating significantly re what counts as "Waldo"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872676 I googled around trying to figure out what year James McKee created the Trinity Hall prime. The internet is (IMO) presenting it mainly as some kind of Wonder of the Ancient World — with the date of creation conveniently filed off. The first post below claims that the year McKee left Cambridge and created the prime was 1996. It seems to have hit peak internet presence only in the 2010s, though, so I wish there were an authoritative source to confirm (or deny) the 1996 date. https://www.bradyharanblog.com/blog/artistic-prime-numbers https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/10/trinity-hall-prime/ https://www.futilitycloset.com/2020/01/12/more-prime-images/

> Computationally it's trivial to detect illegal moves You're strictly correct, but the rules for chess are infamously hard to implement (as anyone who's tried to write a chess program will know), leading to minor bugs in a lot of chess programs. For example, there's this old myth about vertical castling being allowed due to ambiguity in the ruleset: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/12/11/outside-the-box/ (Probably not historically accurate). If you move beyond legal positions into who wins when one side flags, the rules state that the other side should be awarded a victory if checkmate was possible with any legal sequence of moves. This is so hard to check that no chess program tries to implement it, instead using simpler rules to achieve a very similar but slightly more conservative result.

By coincidence (?), Futility Closet has just posted an interesting argument by philosopher Ned Markosianto that 'time is not the fourth dimension': https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/03/27/sideways-music/

Thanks for this I’ve been trying to read more fiction. Futility Closet episode 181 has a more historical account if folks prefer audio over text (that’s how I first learned of it): https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/12/11/podcast-episode-181-operatio…

Funny seeing this here. I've been going through the past episodes of a podcast, Futility Closet, and they covered this: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/03/05/podcast-episode-191-longest-…

Feynman had something similar: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2014/04/06/unquote-406/amp/ “[John] von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!” — Richard Feynman

The podcast Futility Closet had an entire episode on the book: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2015/05/18/podcast-episode-58-english-a…