Carl Worden writes in Sierra Times:

Now pinch yourself and review this astonishing turn of events: A highly trained and educated federal prosecutor in Memphis was unable to convince 12 American citizens that Vernice Kuglin was required to pay federal income taxes. He was clearly unable to produce a single section of the Tax Code to that end, and the jury was unanimous in clearing Kuglin of all charges against her. If the foregoing was not so, Kuglin would have been convicted.

I remain puzzled. ( . . more . . )

The Pythagoreans, legend has it, saw each of the regular solids as a symbol of one of the elements: tetrahedron fire, octahedron air, icosahedron water, cube earth — leaving the dodecahedron to stand for the universe, or quintessence, or spirit. It’s rather a pity that they weren’t so named, pyromorph, aeromorph, hydromorph, geomorph, cosmomorph; the nomenclature of the other uniform polytopes (particularly those of four dimensions) would be somewhat cleaner.

2004 Oct 04: It is a charming coincidence that the cosmos was briefly suspected of being cosmomorphic.

So this personnel agent asks me to add some items to my résumé and mail it to her. No sweat. I keep the thing in HTML, because it’s convenient and relatively efficient. But when my agent gets it, oh dear, she sees no icon showing the attachment (because HTML is a format that Outlook understands, so it displays the content rather than a mere icon) and so she can’t save my résumé in her database and mail it to the client. Could I possibly put it in (I groan in anticipation) Word?

So I go to my housemate’s computer, download résumé.html (2617 bytes), open it in MessyWord, save it in Redmond format (23552 bytes), mail it to myself, save it, and mail that to the agent.

Argh. Such irony: her convenience requires the file to be in a format that her mail client cannot read; and so I send it in a format with the most generic extension — .doc — which Their own mail client treats as alien.

Blaise Gassend charts what happens to an object that falls from the Space Elevator.

about tomaken – look at the source for a chuckle. (link from Redmaiden)

Hey wow, I scored 10 out of 15 in Spot Michael Jackson’s Nose. (Link from Spastic Mutant.)

I’ve just finished reading John Holbrook Vance’s novel Bad Ronald (1973), and it’s keeping me awake. I wonder how much of its creepiness is due to its being set in California rather than on the planet Cadwal, and how much to its being told from the murderer’s viewpoint.

Later I learn that Bad Ronald was made into a stinker of a tv movie. Oh well!

Later still — and another movie in French.