Programmers seem to have an affinity for the strange and mysterious. We accept that 0.1 + 0.2 doesn't always equal 0.3. We hunt bugs that vanish the moment you attach a debugger, as if the code somehow knows it's being watched. And we've spent decades pondering what it means that, given an arbitrary program and input, we might not be able to say for certain whether the program will simply run forever or eventually halt.
And those are only a few examples of the many true but strange things we take for granted that leave non-programmers scratching their heads going, "Wait . . . what?!?!"
We work in a profession that strives for orderly, predictable, and calculable results, but we're also often intrigued and drawn to all the stuff that doesn't quite fit the mold or, better yet, breaks it.
And that's precisely the spirit behind the new digital publication, You Gotta Be Freakin' Kidding Me (YGBFKM). Co-founded by our own Publisher Emeritus, Dave Rankin, YGBFKM is a free digital publication dedicated to peer-vetted science and mainstream headlines that sound totally fake but aren't.
A 62-foot long octopus that eats marine reptiles? An ancient cyclops eye hiding inside your brain? A 6,200-year-old structure whose very existence defies explanation? An inexplicable astronomical object that maintains a strict 44-minute clock?
All true stories. All peer vetted. All things leaving scientists and researchers quite puzzled.
So if you enjoy diving into the edge cases, solving the puzzles, or just being genuinely stumped, remember to check out YGBFKM for a weekly dose of very strange but completely true stories.
And while you're at it, remember to use promo code "YGBFKM" all week for 40% off our entire collection of Brain Teasers. You might not be able to solve the mystery of the alien signal, but you might be able to figure out what this outputs:
const hex = "0x1E"; console.log(hex - 0);
