Dan Alderson once made a map of nearby stars by mounting little colored spheres on threads strung between holes in two sheets of heavy clear plastic.

It occurs to me that, taking the stars in pairs, he could use half as many threads; each would be oblique and therefore longer, but none would be twice as long as the straight threads.

Such a design would be error-prone in execution, and thread is cheap. But I think Dan would chuckle at the suggestion.

This site might disappear for a stupid reason: when my webhost tries to bill my Visa card, something in the chain spits “address verification failure”. I’ve tried variations of my new address (as well as my old address) with no luck. My bank keeps seeing transactions “pending”, as if a restaurant had swiped the card to authorize a sale but not presented the signed slip.

Today I got the first bank statement with my new address, and copied it byte for byte into the web invoice form — with and without the Zipcode extension, with my new and old telephone numbers. Still no joy.

Patrick Henry said in 1775:

It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts.

Was he aware that he conflated two episodes of the Odyssey?