For Dad‘s birthday I got him a brass sextant. “Thank you, a GPS unit is one gadget that I didn’t have!”

QOTD:

I’ve seen a lot of science-fiction movies. Before now I never knew what a couple hundred thousand flying metal squid fighting a couple thousand heavily armed steel apes in a concrete hemisphere about a quarter mile across while occasional giant drill bits fall from the ceiling like deadly stalactites (pause for breath) looked like.

John & Belle Have A Blog: Matrix Revolutions

Incidentally, I wonder how many of you who write raw HTML take a secret pleasure in re-wrapping the lines to emphasize the phrasing, using EOL as an invisible demi-comma. (2004 Oct 26: That habit came back to bite me, when I converted my archives to WordPress which may be considered to have a bug when it comes to newlines.)

Bullet matching (another link from Paul Hsieh). I seem to remember hearing about a decade ago, in the context of some sensational shooting, that a gun barrel does not mark a bullet as clearly and uniquely as folklore would have it. (I wondered at the time whether this revelation would soon be reflected in television. Guess not.)

2006: The link is now stale.

Why do gun-grabbers hate people so much?

2006: The link is now stale. I don’t remember the item, but I’ll bet it was a piece of hate mail from someone who hopes advocates of RKBA are gruesomely murdered.

Saturday at a gun shop, my eye was caught by the archaic stocks of a couple of Ruger “Vaquero” revolvers (modern versions of obsolete guns, made for rodeo sports). Looking closer, I saw that their calibers were .45 and .32. That puts me in my place.

2004 Sep 04: Oops! This post formerly linked to one (from 2002 Oct 05) that has now vanished. It said:

Rex Stout, author of the ‘Nero Wolfe’ mysteries, made a point never to use real-life brand names. But in “Death of a Demon” (1961) he went one step further: the murder weapon is a .32 revolver, and I at least have never (otherwise) heard of such a thing.

If you like my mathematical doodles you’ll like BIT-101 ActionScript Laboratory — hundreds of little exercises in Flash, by Keith Peters. (Found on Joshua Schachter’s muxway by Dan O’Neill)

One useful 404 notice:

The requested URL /~bthomas/vamp/vampecology.htm was not found on this server.

bthomas is not a current Leland user.

That saves me the trouble of climbing down the directory tree.