“The German biologist Max Schultze, lying on his deathbed, observed, perhaps wistfully, that he was leaving a world where “all the important questions . . . had now been settled.” All of them, that is, “except the eel question.”
(...)
People caught eels in brooks, rivers, lakes, the sea. They also caught them, inexplicably, in ponds that dried out and refilled each year, and that had no access to other bodies of water. They couldn’t help but notice that the creatures seemed to have no ovaries, no testicles, no eggs, no milt. That they were never observed to mate. 
(...)
When this last metamorphosis happens, the eel’s stomach dissolves—it will travel thousands of miles on its fat reserves alone—and its reproductive organs develop for the first time. In the eels of Europe, no one could find those organs because they did not yet exist.
(...)
That European eels come from the Sargasso Sea remains the official word of science. And yet no one has ever seen Anguilla anguilla mating anywhere, or so much as set eyes on a mature eel, living or dead, in the Sargasso Sea.

Ben Orlin:
“You’re about to spend the next 25 minutes watching a guy solve a Sudoku. Not only that, but it’s going to be the highlight of your day.

Today's culture shock video: A Canadian stays in the Netherlands for a year and a half, realizes that during that time he hasn't seen a single car crash into a building, and finds that so puzzling that he decides to investigate.

Meanwhile, I've lived in Sweden all my life and I've never seen a car crash into a building. Crashing into buildings is ... not a thing that's supposed to happen.

tl;dw: In North America, streets in residential areas are built for speed, while in Northern Europe they're built for safety – drivers are assumed to be imperfect, streets are built to accommodate that, and if there is an accident, there is an investigation to find out if the street can be made safer.

“We're introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles.

“This post is a list of fundamental changes we might see over the next years; some are soon and inevitable, others are unlikely long-term wishes for twenty years out.

“Companies like Microsoft and Sony frequently marketed toxicity as a key selling point for their new online gaming platforms. This is a puzzling strategy from the vantage point of 2020, a time when toxicity is practically synonymous with online gaming and too often spills over into real-world harassment.

“A VFX producer friend of a friend was hired in November to finish some of the 400 effects shots in @catsmovie. His entire job was to remove CGI buttholes that had been inserted a few months before. Which means that, somewhere out there, there exists a butthole cut of Cats. Finding this cut is my white whale #ReleaseTheButtholeCut

Airbnb has a patent for AI that crawls and scrapes everything it can find on you, including social media.

“This is by no means a definitive list of cool indie games coming out this year. But they are the ones that caught my eye.

Download the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Life You Can Save for free as an eBook or audiobook.

“In the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer brings his landmark book up to date. In addition to presenting his compelling arguments about how we should respond to extreme poverty, Peter examines the progress we are making and recounts how the first edition transformed the lives both of readers and the people they have helped.

The AI face generator was recently improved, and the results are a lot more realistic. Although you still sometimes get ears or front teeth of different sizes, and headgear like scarves can look weird.

Calculus Made Easy is a book on calculus originally published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson, considered a classic and elegant introduction to the subject.

“The preliminary terror, which chokes off most fifth-form boys from even attempting to learn how to calculate, can be abolished once for all by simply stating what is the meaning–in common-sense terms–of the two principal symbols that are used in calculating.

These dreadful symbols are:

(1) d which merely means “a little bit of.”

(2) ∫ which is merely a long S, and may be called (if you like) “the sum of.”

Thus ∫dx means the sum of all the little bits of x.