Drunken Stevey writes about Perl as an ancient language, in his long rambling style. He agrees with my belief that developers should take a compilers course:

The disease, nay, the virus of programming-language religion has a simple cure: you just write a compiler. Or an interpreter. One for any language other than the one you know best. It’s as easy as that. After you write a compiler (which, to be sure, is a nontrivial task, but if there’s some valid program out there that you couldn’t ever write, then you’re not justified in calling yourself a programmer), the disease simply vanishes. In fact, for weeks afterwards, you can’t look at your code without seeing right through it, with exactly the same sensation you get when you stare long enough at a random-dot stereogram: you see your code unfold into a beautiful parse tree, with scopes winding like vines through its branches, the leaves flowering into assembly language or bytecode.

Here’s a metal pen that never needs to be sharpened or refilled. It’s an ancient stylus, initially made from silver. Even though they make reasonable marks on paper, they’re a relatively rare drawing tool.

From the cool-yet-creepy-creature department: vampire sea spiders suck on prey, also known as Pantopoda or pycnogonids.

The Way We Eat Now, an essay that describes how our ancient bodies collide with modern technology (to produce a flabby, disease-ridden populace).

The Mokume Gane Story, a brief history of an ancient Japanese metallurgy technique and how it can be used today. The process produces some really neat looking pieces.