I discovered this gem a few years ago, by accident, while I was researching the Furtwängler performance of April 20, 1942 [more] Originally, there was a shorter version of Kelly’s presentation on youtube, but he re-recorded it and has made it available on Harvard’s edX [Kelly] free online educational program.
… Is we talk about books.
In a past thread, someone commented about topologists not knowing the difference between a donut and a coffee cup.
I forwarded that to a friend of mine who’s a recovering topologist, who said “of course we can tell the difference: coffee stays in a cup and leaves a donut.”
From Gene Wolf’s “The Shadow of The Torturer”:
I put on the cloak… the hue fuligin, which is darker than black, admirably erases all folds, bunchings and gatherings so far as the eye is concerned, showing only a featureless dark.
If you’re a Shakespeare fan (i.e.: you speak English) and you haven’t ever heard of this before, I’ve probably just altered your holiday gift request list.
I first heard this during a filksing at Balticon in 1980. There was a local group called “Clam Chowder” that used to perform twice a night at the con; it’s where I learned the words to “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” – a song which had a lot to do with turning me anti-war.
A couple of years ago, I read some reference to Klein bottles, which made me decide to see how well people have represented them on 2D surfaces. So I google image-searched them and hit the wrong option in my search bar, which took me to Ebay instead of Google.
(This is an edited re-post from my old ranum.com site)
Most people don’t realize how gosh-darned easy it is to make pizza dough. So they go buy something from the supermarket that’s made of plastic, wrapped in plastic, and intended to be covered in plastic. Let me give you some advice:
Don’t Do It.
[Read more…]
This is what it looks like out here, this time of year. There’s a house up the street that has a yellow tree like this, and a red one, close together. Some years they both go colors at the same time, and it’s eye-bending.
I have to confess something: I never thought Picasso’s cubism was all that brilliant. It sort of reminds me of the kinds of things a 6-year-old does with magic markers, and a parent sticks up on the refrigerator with a magnet. Speaking of “refrigerator art”, anyway, this is delightful: a father with some experience at photoshop re-renders his 6-year-old’s cubist masterpieces: