From Wikipedia

'... there is as yet no research that has determined the percentage of people who are actually laughing out loud when they write "LOL".'

I am a Camera

"Madison Van Duyne said she and her classmates in a media writing class were on 'lockdown' in their classrooms. They were huddled in the middle of the classroom, writing stories about the shootings and posting them online."
-- from the CNN page about the Virginia Tech shootings

"In Iowa, This is How We Play"

My Friend Flickr

Set up a little page here. But what you should really do is click right through to billygoat's page and check out the hot poodle.

Opening Day, 1910

"TAFT TOSSES BALL," announced The Washington Post. "Crowd Cheers President's Fine Delivery of the Sphere."

In My Next Life

This guy sounds like fun -- he runs a "4x4 cafe" in Victoria Falls. I don't remember the surfing route that got me here -- something about Zimbabwe.

Monkey Dust

Renard Numbers

I don't yet quite understand the logic behind this (why is the error minimized, exactly?), but I really like seeing the reasoning behind the standard:

"Renard's system of preferred numbers divides the interval from 1 to 10 into 5, 10, 20, or 40 steps. The factor between two consecutive numbers in a Renard series is constant (before rounding), namely the 5th, 10th, 20th, or 40th root of 10 (1.58, 1.26, 1.12, and 1.06, respectively), which leads to a geometric sequence. This way, the maximum relative error is minimized if an arbitrary number is replaced by the nearest Renard number multiplied by the appropriate power of 10.

The most basic R5 series consists of these five rounded numbers:

R5: 1.00 1.60 2.50 4.00 6.30

Example: If our design constraints tell us that the two screws in our gadget can be spaced anywhere between 32 mm and 55 mm apart, we make it 40 mm, because 4 is in the R5 series of preferred numbers.

Example: If you want to produce a set of nails with lengths between roughly 15 and 300 mm, then the application of the R5 series would lead to a product repertoire of 16 mm, 25 mm, 40 mm, 63 mm, 100 mm, 160 mm, and 250 mm long nails."

From this wikipedia entry.

Happy Passover!

Snow

Boston is supposed to be hit with a major snowstorm -- so I'm going to see if I can track the rising chaos. Or show the encroaching grey as rainy slush melts boringly on the ever-wetter pavement. In any case -- here's a shot from Cambridge at noon:



Oops! That's not Cambridge, it's my facemates Ruth and Dashe, with their sea monkeys! Ruth is being cute, and Dashe is holding Andre Dawson. The sea monkeys are crowned with a yellow Peep. Back to the presnow:



Two o'clock picture:



Three o'clock picture:

Rendering Fun of the Day

This picture is a model / rendering I did for a Japanese architecture class; it's a 1954 house by an architect named Seike. After rendering the model, I decided it needed a Japanese Barbie to really bring out the best features of the work.

From Storr, "Music and the Mind"

"People usually complain that music is so ambiguous that it leaves them in such doubt as to what they are supposed to think, whereas words can be understood by everyone. But to me it seems exactly the opposite." -- Felix Mendelssohn

"Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer." -- Heidegger

Centennial Bridge, Rock Island

Sylvan Slough