#language

An ancient Egyptian mummy buried with pages from the Iliad — not as literature, but as technology for navigating the afterlife.

WKRP in Cincinnati just became a real radio station. Which raises the question: what else have we made real by pretending long enough?

How languages carve color space differently — and what happens to perception when a word appears.

The axiom of choice sounds obvious until you follow it to its conclusions — then you end up with a ball that can be decomposed and reassembled into two balls of the same size.

Ultrafinitism says infinity doesn't exist — and the most interesting thing about that position is what it forces you to build instead.

A cipher that outlasted everyone who could have explained it — and what finally cracked it open.

A 1,000-year-old musical setting of Boethius has been reconstructed and performed — and what's strange isn't that it survived, but what it survived as.

Medieval manuscripts are full of bizarre, wrong-looking animals — and the reason why tells you something about what happens when knowledge travels without the thing it describes.

On index fossils, technical vocabulary, and the strange way specialized words become visible only in their absence.