On reading The Silmarillion I was mildly bothered that, in a story mainly about Elves, Elvish children are never mentioned. (Half-Elf children appear in a couple of episodes, as baggage.) Children are relatively scarce among immortals (because they spend a smaller fraction of their time as children), but still, a number of prominent Elves were born during the period chronicled, and you’d think at least one of them might have done something memorable before coming of age.

This cartoon suggests an answer.

2006: That site’s archive has been reorganized and I can’t find the scene in question. It had several humans and a vampire chatting over coffee. Human: “You look about nineteen, but being a vampire you could be any age, right? So, are you centuries old?” Vampire: “I’m twelve.”

I’m working on my first nontrivial bit of text-parsing: a little program to extract search-strings from my HTTP logs. Unfortunately (but naturally) each search-engine has its own conventions and so I may never identify all the relevant fields!

I’m using Python, though I suppose I ought to do it in Perl for practice.

Ever notice that blunt is not always a synonym for pointless ?

Collateral damage: “There Was a Report of Guns and Drugs”

In the case of Alberta Spruill, the cops were enforcing the law. An investigation into whether they followed correct procedures is warranted, but an examination into the laws they were enforcing is even more important. It’s time to reconsider both the war on drugs and the war on guns, for the sake of future innocent victims.

DigiBarn Posters: Mother Tongues of Computer Languages

Hyperbolic geometry, provoked by “Not Knot”. The shape at the end of that show is an ideal rhombic dodecahedron (‘ideal’ means some of its vertices are at infinity) seen from inside; here it is seen from outside, in the Poincaré model.

My One True Ex refuses to believe that my telephone plays Night on Bald Mountain, insisting that it sounds more like the theme from Doctor Who.