A few months ago, a grad student at MIT asked permission to use my illustration of a diamond crystal in an article for Physics World. I got the December issue in today’s mail. Wow — my modest doodle (re-rendered, for higher resolution, from my Povray source code) fills a page as the first illustration in the cover story!
The article is “Sound Ideas” by Taras Gorishnyy, Martin Maldovan, Chaitanya Ullal and Edwin Thomas.
My car was covered with frost this morning. Its north-facing window had large crystal domains, looking like galvanized metal.
There are scholars of slang who hunt for earliest documentable uses. Does anyone do the same for puns?
In 1971, Larry Niven and David Gerrold published a novel The Flying Sorcerors. Recently for the first time I found that pun made circa 1959 (but I’ve forgotten the context). And just now I heard an even earlier one: in “Broom-Stick Bunny”, 1956, Bugs says, “You’re not gonna believe this: I just saw a genie with light brown hair chasing a flying sorceress.”
papersplease.org has info on Deborah Davis (busted for refusing to show her papers when a city bus crossed Fed turf), Dudley Hiibel (busted under Nevada law for failing to comply with an arbitrary demand for his papers) and John Gilmore (suing for restoration of our right to travel).
Hiibel’s case was lost at the Supreme Court. Gilmore’s is to be heard shortly by the Ninth Circuit. Davis is to be arraigned this week in federal court (District of Colorado).
Wednesday: Feds evidently decided not to risk making Davis a test case.
In the past few days I’ve received dozens of robot comments whose only plausible purpose is to see what will get through the filters. Most of them contained exactly three links to well-known entities, most of them in entertainment or news; this could be to test how many links my filter allows before treating a comment as spam.
Thursday: That’s stopped, but now I’m getting some consisting only of links to nonexistent domains.
Progressives don’t allow us white males many privileges as such, but a great one is that no matter what political opinions we may hold we don’t get slimed in racist language for them.