Steve Baker tells the tale of the Utah Teapot. (Found through another Steve’s links.)
Links in turn to the Stanford Bunny.
And what collection of digital models would be complete without Lena Sjööblom?
I first saw her in Foley & van Dam, where her face (cropped rather tight) was used to illustrate halftoning; my copy vanished in ~1982, and I now have a later edition without her (*snif*).
I had not heard of Nicholas Flamel before Harry Potter. Here is an article about him from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness Of Crowds.
Samuel Johnson 1768 (by way of the Future of Freedom Foundation)
They make a rout about universal liberty without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty.
The physicists at Los Alamos sometimes had trouble interfacing with local government, and so a new small county was carved for them out of Sandoval County. But a small bit was left over, so now Sandoval has an exclave of about 3 km2 between Los Alamos and Santa Fe counties. I found a map [old link removed] that shows the fragment, and also the reason for its existence: it is part of San Ildefonso Indian Reservation. (The rest of the Reservation is in Santa Fe County; and the map also suggests that the eastern part of the new county was taken from Santa Fe.)
Later: Another map (click Topo and zoom in).
A quibble or two with James Lileks (skip down to “Warning: the following is Screedy”):
Well, don’t START A WAR WITH AMERICA, then.
Well, y’know, most of the bombees at Hiroshima didn’t. Is it overly pedantic to distinguish between the rulers and the ruled?
And I like the idea that because we had intelligence failings, we shouldn’t have prosecuted the war. Why, next thing you know, rape victims who didn’t check the closet before going to bed will expect the police to arrest someone.
Heh.
My father was part of the force that would have invaded the Japanese mainland. . . . And if he’d been torn to bloody ribbons like half his friends, I wouldn’t be here, and my amazing Gnat slumbering in the other room wouldn’t be here either. Most important: if Japanese militarism hadn’t conflated tyranny, racism, and territorial expansion with a mystical notion of national honor and ethnic destiny, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have looked the same in ’46 as they did in ’41.
Or if the President had not prolonged the war by insisting on unconditional surrender, when Japanese ministers were trying to make a deal (for the Emperor’s personal safety). But who’s counting?