From TexasBestGrok:

Take this list of the 100 top-grossing movies of all time and bold the titles of the ones you have seen. I am following the lead of others and bolding the ones I remember mainly from having seen them in the theater, and italicizing the ones I primarily remember having seen on the small screen (VHS/DVD/Cable, etc.):

Okay, whatever. I’ve also corrected “Movie with a Very Long Title, The” to human-friendly format. ( . . more . . )

from Astronomy Picture of the Day, an amazing shot of Phoebe. Guess it’s time to pay some attention to the Cassini mission. (Cited on The Eternal Golden Braid)

My host was down for awhile this morning, because of latency problems upstream.

Hee hee. Some Browncoat has put up a clock counting down to the scheduled release of Serenity, Joss Whedon’s big-screen sequel to Firefly.

The Straight Dope currently has a column about the golden ratio and a staff report about Fibonacci numbers. These have prompted a thread on the Straight Dope Message Board which raises a couple of mathematical questions to which I’d like to post my answers. But the SDMB is now a pay site, and I’m not about to pay $14.95 to share my knowledge.

A logical place to respond to the Straight Dope is alt.fan.cecil-adams, but I swore off posting there.

Well then, I’ll post here.

One of the questions is the relation between transcendental and irrational numbers. An algebraic number is a solution to a polynomial equation of the form a₀ x⁰ + . . . + a_n xⁿ = 0, where the coefficients a_i are integers (whole numbers, not necessarily positive). If n=1 then x = -a₀/a₁, a rational number. Real numbers other than algebraic numbers are called transcendental. (Are there transcendentals which can be considered roots of integer polynomials of infinite degree?) As the rationals are a special case of the algebraics, it follows that a transcendental number cannot be rational.

The other interesting question is what it means to describe φ (phi) a.k.a. τ (tau) as the most irrational number. Any real number can be expressed as a continued fraction — and I see that that page says all that I was about to say on the subject.

Russell approves of my latest choice of portrait [which may reappear on the masthead if I ever learn how].
It was taken on Halloween like these two. I didn’t have any digital pix of myself in left profile, or holding a weapon.

Declan McCullough: Why the FCC should die (cited by Travis)