Angela Vierling is a grad student, studying algebraic geometry; and she has a blog. Sadly, it’s not very active.
August 2003: It’s a lot more active than it was.
October 2004: it’s gone, but she saved some archives.

Bias for heads in euro coins? More study needed.

I dreamt I was listening to Tom Lehrer sing one of his standards, with an extra verse I had not heard before. Of course it was (seemed) brilliant, and of course I could not remember a word of it come daylight.

Mark Steyn argues:

If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable politicians — as they’re doing in France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. Le Pen is not an aberration but the logical consequence.

(Link from Vodkapundit)

Anybody in France: Is Le Pen pronounced like pin, pan or penne?

Update: François Velde writes, “The last; it rimes with haine . . .” [‘hate’]

The Economist reports:

In an out-of-court settlement between Nigeria’s government and the family of the late Sani Abacha, $1 billion that the military ruler looted from the central bank and stashed in banks worldwide will be returned to Nigeria.

You know what this means? They’ll have to smuggle it out all over again, and helpful foreigners will have another opportunity to cash in!!

(If you don’t know what I’m on about, look up “419”.)

Over several years now I have worked sporadically to catalog hypothetical fullerenes — i.e. convex closed surfaces built of pentagons and hexagons. Last year I tossed out my old work in C to start over in Python, whose list primitive and transparent memory management made it easier to extend and generalize the project, which I now describe as enumerating and classifying roughly-convex surfaces formed of roughly-equilateral triangles. The primary goal, I suppose, is to practice my programming; another is to build a database of nonspherical “geodesic dome” shapes.

I had the idea of working the search tree in horizontal bands: find all forms with up to N vertices, saving the partial solutions for the next pass, which would read them from a file and build on them the forms with up to N+8 vertices, and so on. But my programming studies never touched on file i/o beyond the crudest, so I let that aspect sit until I learned more.

Recently I learned about Python’s shelve module, a transparent database interface which seemed just the ticket . . . until the partials file ate all the free space on my disc! <voice=”Marvin the Martian”>Back to the drawing board.</voice>