bureaucracy trumps reality

Posted on Sunday, 2002 December 01 by Anton

The Strange Tale of Unlucky Luciano (washingtonpost.com). It happened to me, too – partly. Born to American parents in Italy, I had three birth certificates: two Italian (one since lost) and one from the US consulate in Venice. One of the Italian papers says nata, the feminine form of ‘born’. Happily, nobody ever needed to look at that one.

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rocks

Posted on Sunday, 2002 December 01 by Anton

Saturday my One True Ex took me to a gem show in San Mateo. I had good fun. Won’t tell you everything I bought, because I don’t know for sure that none of my family read this. (Somebody is reading, because the blog gets over forty hits a day, yet I only know of about thirty people who have ever visited here; maybe they’re all crawler-bots. But I digress.) I did buy a bunch of pretty rocks that beg to be admired in sunlight, including tumble-polished chunks of rutilated quartz, some fossilized coral, and six tiny opals.

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fun with leptons

Posted on Sunday, 2002 December 01 by Anton

Facts about Electricity

Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain? This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson.

(thanks to Chris Cooper)

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Clarke got it crooked

Posted on Saturday, 2002 November 30 by Anton

Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. Essay by Vanessa Layne.

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catalog for a reference library

Posted on Saturday, 2002 November 30 by Anton

“CanonicalTomes is a volunteer-created, volunteer-administered, and user-contributed database of books or other works which define their respective domains. The hope is that in time, someone approaching a field for the first time, or someone from within the field looking for the best reference will find herein the consensus of their peers.”
It’s rather young yet, so go make your mark on it!

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tits over time

Posted on Thursday, 2002 November 28 by Anton

Some public-spirited person has posted [and soon thereafter removed] all of Playboy’s centerfolds from Norma Jean to Miss October 2002. (I can’t resist a complete series of anything at all interesting.) It’s not without interest to compare the earlier and the later. The pseudo-candid style was established very early on; often a narrative is suggested, though sometimes a puzzling one:
Continue reading →

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that’s just the drugs talking, dear

Posted on Thursday, 2002 November 28 by Anton

Do you enjoy dictionaries as much as I do? The Office of National Drug Control Policy (boo hiss) publishes this one: Street Terms: Drugs and the Drug Trade.
(Link provided by Michael Travers, as an aside from a digression about drugs as metaphor for programming languages.)

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