Teolinda Gersão’s The Woman Who Stole the Rain:
That was when I heard what they were saying. One of them did most of the talking, while the other merely asked a question now and then or made the occasional sound. Theirs were two different and unequal voices.
The rain, I heard one of them say. It was because of the rain.
– Teolinda Gersão
A wonderful photoblog: If this isn’t Jazz…
Björk and PJ Harvey covering Satisfaction:
So, whether or not she knew it, the quilter had infused her blanket with tidbits of considerable mathematical interest. It turns out that this is actually not uncommon in quilts: from the color patterns of the quilt blocks to the intricate curves in the top-stitching, quilts can communicate a great deal of mathematical insight… and keep you warm, as well! I spent the rest of that day making interesting mental notes about the lovely intersection between the art of quilting and the art of mathematics. That carried over to today, and I figured it’d be neat to show you, valued reader, some of the gems I found over the past two years. Let’s go.
Richard Jones treats us to a thoroughly documented implementation of a minimal Forth core, one of my favorite languages.
Shrinking Kilogram Bewilders Physicists
Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.
“The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart,” he said. “We don’t really have a good hypothesis for it.”
A few years before the first landing of an Apollo crew on the moon, scientists recontoured a volcanic field just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona, with artificial impact craters resembling those found on Mare Tranquillitatis, the proposed first manned American landing site.
With high explosives, they terraformed a lunar surrogate right here on the surface of the earth.
This is interesting, I never knew about this training ground. Neat stuff.
“Off in the darkness hourses moved restlessly”
—a typo in Clifford Simak’s A Heritage of StarsWe believed they were horses; and so
we saddled up, we rode expectantly
through the long day and into the night.
Then we dismounted; and slept; and still
they continued to carry us
—the hours. They wouldn’t stop.
They carried us clean away.
– Albert Goldbarth, originally in Beloit Poetry Journal
