Tsk. A current radio spot gives the web address “wachovia dot com backslash new”.

Meanwhile, what’s new with me?

I’m reading Coxeter’s Non-Euclidean Geometry in the hope that it will give me the stuff I’ve sought in vain in other books: the actual formulae for coordinate transforms under the various isometries, rather than useless taunts like “a matrix with such-and-such properties” (which I don’t know how to recognize let alone generate). But it uses so many cryptic notations that I’m afraid I won’t understand the formulae if they do show up. Exercises would help. [Later: No such luck. It barely touches on H3 at all.]

My car’s starter burned itself out. Luckily this happened at home on my day off; a few hours later, all was well. My housemate pointed out that my last bit of car trouble (a dead battery) also happened at home. What a well-behaved car!

Pillow, the junior cat, has been smelling of smoke lately; and we don’t know where he’s pooping. It would seem he has found a second home, though that’s odd since he consistently flees human strangers. Perhaps he was seduced with catnip.

Roderick Long (1993): How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis: Medical Insurance that Worked – Until Government “Fixed” It

Hey, I’m a fictional character! Dr. Anton Sherwood, “an older man in a tweed suit”, appears in The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld, a novel about which I know nothing else. (I searched for my name, as one sometimes does, this time looking for ones that aren’t me.)

Eye exam this morning: almost no change in four years.

I mentioned that I’m thinking of surgery. Before I brought up my more specific idea of having one eye adjusted for distance and one for arm’s length, the optometrist did: apparently “monovision” surgery is not uncommon – but it’s a good idea to try it first with contacts. Wish I’d thought of that!

Years ago, in a Usenet thread about Lincoln’s unconstitutional reconquest of the South, someone asked me (I paraphrase): “As a descendant of slaves, why should I prefer to live in that alternate history where the CSA continued to keep slaves after 1865?”

I had no answer then, but one has recently occurred to me:

For several reasons I believe that slavery was more likely to end if secession was successful than if the secession had never happened. If the end of slavery were not tied to a tremendous grudge of blood and devastation, might not social equality come sooner even if formal liberation came later?

I don’t suppose this is really a novelty, but it hasn’t happened to me before . . at least not recently:

I got a penis spam addressed to newyorkgirl711@pobox.com.

Come to think of it, there used to be breast-enhancing spams too, and I haven’t seen one of those in quite a while. Must not have sold well, which says something.

When they say “we’re fighting them in Iraq so that we don’t have to fight them at home,” what do they mean?

I’m imagining wannabe-terrorists throughout the Moslem world moaning, “I’d like to go to the Great Satan and blow shit up, but I can’t get past that cursed roadblock in Baghdad!” . . . but that’s just silly.

Is Iraq vital to terrorist logistics? Almost as silly, but maybe the War Party has got enough of the People convinced of it.

One other interpretation makes sense to me: that “our” forces are in Iraq to provide the terrorists with a more convenient and conspicuous target.

Four years ago I posted a link to satellite images of the forest fires then burning in California. In the past month that post has attracted well over a thousand searches!