Giuseppe Peano, whom you may know from numbers, had his own run at an international auxiliary language, Latino sino flexione. There seems to have been a real fervor for auxiliary languages around the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, some of which were pretty neat: Interlingua, for one, is fairly intelligible to English speakers who know enough of the French- and Latin-origin words or studied a Romance language. Sadly, Peano and pals never saw the XKCD comic on introducing a new standard, which would have saved them all some time.
On the other hand, if Peano were alive today, maybe he’d realize the one enduring universal language is NES ROMs: Triple Jump is a physical cartridge containing three recent NES games, shipping in 2024 — over forty years after the console was introduced…!
An NYPL archivist describes Timothy Leary’s efforts to collaborate with Keith Haring, whom he met through Grace Jones, on a “mind movie” based on William Gibson’s Neuromancer. This is as out there as anything in Jodorowski’s Dune.
Marc Brooker shows off a nice generalization of request hedging. I know intellectually that communication in time and space are the same thing, but I’m still impressed every time I see a technique I usually encounter in storage systems get used in networking and vice versa.
Strong arrows for gradual typing is one of those great obvious-in-hindsight ideas: have arrow types indicate whether a statically-typed function checks the type of its arguments, letting you easily cut down on the number of checks at dynamic-to-static callsites while retaining soundness.