Frabjous Times

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Links for August 2005

Here are the short take links for August:
  • A simple introduction to topological surfaces for students, including some links on history, art, and literature.
  • I did make it to this year's Philippine Fiesta in Secaucus, for a couple of hours, long enough to take in the Mass, the Santacruzan procession, some of the traditional music and dance performances, and the vendors, including the hip booth of FiliIslander where I picked up a special little onesie for my niece-to-be. I also found a copy of The Best Philippine Short Stories of the Twentieth Century which I plan to quote here in the future.
  • I read Swann's Way when I was in grad school, mostly on the bus between Cambridge and Watertown, and was pleasantly drawn in to fin-de-siècle French village of Combray. I think I did start to read The Guermantes Way but did not finish it at the time. After reading this article on Salon (site pass or membership), I am not sure whether I want to take the leap and make the 70-day investment of time to read the rest of the series once known as Rememberance of Things Past and now called In Search of Lost Time just yet, but maybe someday.
  • The annoying junk faxes I get to my business line come in waves. The most recent one is a stock pitch with the following splash:
    KATRINA MEANS [stock name omitted] IS POISED FOR A MASSSIVE [sic] RUN UP AS DEMAND TO REPAIR HOMES SKYROCKETS
    There are ways, not always certain, but sometimes helpful, to identify these disgusting scam artists and, if one is perserverant, to collect damages from them.
  • “With a few simple inexpensive changes like these, spacefaring civilizations will think twice before invading our planet.”
  • Weirdly unsettling picture of a robotic dance performance. It might be just a cultural thing, though.
  • I used to love playing with magnets when I was a kid, mainly the small ferrite magnets from Radio Shack which I would drag through the dirt in our backyard to pick up little bits of magnetite. I would have had a real good time with pyrolytic graphite and rare earth alloy magnets
  • Via Making Light:
  • Via Scott Andrew:
  • Via Coudal Partners
    • "Inkjet Haiku" are four lines of exactly 30 characters each (counting spaces and punctuation), perfect for a monospace font.
  • Via Mimi Smartypants:
    • If you need to buy a year's worth of dried food for your emergency shelter (18 cases worth, enough to fill the back of a medium-sized truck), or if all that hurricane disaster footage is giving you a yen for MREs, here's the place for you.
Originally published: 2005/09/03 22:41:52