Esther Schindler writes: In addition to writing the story of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien drew it. The maps and sketches he made while drafting it "informed his storytelling, allowing him to test narrative ideas and illustrate scenes he needed to capture in words," reports Ethan Gilsdorf at Wired. "For Tolkien, the art of writing and the art of drawing were inextricably intertwined." It's all coming out in a new book, but here we get a sneak preview, along with several cool observations, such as: "If Tolkien's nerdy use of graph paper feels like a secret message to future Dungeons & Dragons players, then so does his 'Plan of Shelob's lair.' Tolkien's map of tunnels stocked with nasties—here, a spider named Shelob—would be right at home in any Dungeon Master's campaign notes. He even marks the place for a classic dungeon crawl feature: 'trap.'"

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New submitter Dr. Scatterplot writes: Richard Feynman is celebrated as a brilliant scientist and idiosyncratic character. He is also someone who today might be accused of sexual harassment. That is, if his students felt empowered to report him. Whether his department would have done anything back then is a different matter. How far should academic communities go to protect their intellectual capital, at the expense of further harm to their students, past and present? UC Berkeley and exoplanet astronomers are walking that line with prominent professor and exoplanet discoverer Geoff Marcy. "Four women alleged that Marcy repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping. As a result of the findings, the women were informed, Marcy has been given 'clear expectations concerning his future interactions with students,' which he must follow or risk 'sanctions that could include suspension or dismissal.''

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A toolkit integrating intelligent PostgreSQL dbs into Perl objects

Interface to the online arrival/departure

A framework for Parallel Corpora processing

Represents a date and time of day with an offset from UTC

Perl extension to tie Hashes to CVS trees

TMX tools

Government forces capture village of Atshan in Hama province from opposition fighters, activists and Syrian TV say.

The example set by Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet could benefit Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

Experts predict a billion people will be obese by 2025, but stopping the crisis may take more than a change in diet.

An anonymous reader writes: CloudFlare's content delivery network relies on their ability to shuffle data around. As they've scaled up, they've run into some interesting technical limits on how fast they can manage this. Last month they explained how the unmodified Linux kernel can only handle about 1 million packets per second, when easily-available NICs can manage 10 times that. So, they did what you're supposed to do when you encounter a problem with open source software: they developed a patch for the Netmap project to increase throughput. "Usually, when a network card goes into the Netmap mode, all the RX queues get disconnected from the kernel and are available to the Netmap applications. We don't want that. We want to keep most of the RX queues back in the kernel mode, and enable Netmap mode only on selected RX queues. We call this functionality: 'single RX queue mode.'" With their changes, Netmap was able to receive about 5.8 million packets per second. Their patch is currently awaiting review.

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Tech companies have to at some point say they don't want to lock their users in. Usually this comes toward the end of a cycle, when they've been building up lock-in because the users weren't thinking about it. Eventually users start wondering why when they post something to one service they can't also post it to another. Or why they have to use one vendor's lame version of something another vendor does much better. So they have a press conference where they bring up smaller competitors and get them to say everything is great, when the truth is that it isn't great at all.

That's how you get formats like AMP. Put LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google and Twitter in a room and start with this agenda: 1. Let's make a new open standard we all support. 2. But do it in a way so we don't undermine our individual lock-in. Obviously these are contradictory goals. If you look for the intersection between the two sets, it's very very small. But you try to make it look bigger with fancy language and lots of big names supporting it. And shrimp! Lots of shrimp, and cocktails.

Why did they all put their name on it?

Because they're scared of something.

In this case that something is Facebook.

Each of them has a product that's threatened by the huge size of Facebook and their new interest in news, and their recent track record of spinning off components of the core product, or acquiring companies that compete with them.

The big news orgs need to get their name out there so their board members, shareholders and employees don't get the idea that they're being confined to ever-smaller spaces by the tech giants (which they are regardless of how it looks).

AMP is caching

It's caching. You can use their caching if you conform to certain rules. If you don't you can use your own caching. I can't imagine there's a lot of difference unless Google weighs search results based on whether you use their code. That's Google behaving an awful lot like Microsoft of the 90s. Ultimately that kind of trickery leads to new more free-wheeling options, as Google itself was to Microsoft in the following decades.

Round and round we go!