Adventures of Mr Coo, a wacky bit of Flash animation from Basque-land. (Cited by JoAnne Schmitz.)

At Languagehat, some interesting brief remarks on the Belgian aristocracy’s efforts to seem less alien to Flanders.

Warren Meyer on why libertarians write blogs (cited by Arnold Kling)

A few years ago we thrilled to an exhibit by the Library of Congress of color photographs of Russian life made in 1909–15. Now I learn that the images shown there are a small fraction of the Prokudin-Gorskii plates, most of which were never assembled into color images; and that there is an amateur project to do the rest of them! (Link found here.)

Ed Pegg writes:

I’d like to do a “behind the scenes” look at Mathematical Games for an article. Martin [Gardner] did lots, but he avidly used a lot of help from hundreds of people. I’d like to write an article about the background help. If you ever assisted in one of Martin’s columns, I’d like to hear from you — a note about what you did. I’ll use these notes in my article.

A link from Pegg leads indirectly to a collection of weird and wonderful algorithmic paintings.

This is intended to be an orthographic projection of a stereographic projection from S5 (the five-dimensional surface of a sphere in six-dimensional space) into E5 (flat five-space) of the cartesian product S2 × S2, a kind of torus. The colors represent the three suppressed dimensions.

I did not expect it to look like this, but then, I did not know what to expect.

Voronoi cells of nodes of the golden sector spiral, colored according to three different cycles (one for each primary), all with irrational periods.

Tanaqui Weaver, cited here recently, reports:

the UK issued a neat 2nd-class stamp with an atom of c60 illustrated. It’s thermochromic black, and a hot thumb on the stamp whitens it out to reveal a captive atom of carbon in the centre. pretty.