I'd rather hurt than itch

Another excellent article in The New Yorker - The Itch. I may have to subscribe to that magazine.

On the other hand, Seymour Hirsch "is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters."

Mathematica scrapbook

Some folks at Wolfram Research have put together an online scrapbook to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first release of Mathematica.

Alan Furst

As recommended on the gunroom mailing list: the novels of Alan Furst based in 1930s and 40s Europe.

Anthony Trollope

Added to Mt Toberead: the novels of Anthony Trollope. There doesn't seem to be a "collected works" available at amazon, so what the heck - maybe I'll run them through TeX.

Recommended on the gunroom mailing list in a thread started by someone who spotted a "Plantagenet Palliser For President" bumper sticker.

Mathematica turns 20 today

Stephen Wolfram reflects on 20 years of just starting out and Jean Buck takes a stroll down memory lane and looks at how Mathematica has grown. I started there in May 1996 just after the English edition of Mathematica 3.0 was released - my first job was to help typeset the German and French translations of The Mathematica Book using our homegrown LaTeX-based system.

The Associated Press and fair use

Ann Althouse says "You go, girl" to Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who says, "Sue me, AP!", while Nancy Nall sees AP's point.

The decline and fall of the English sentence?

Here's an interesting article in the Washington Post on the fate of the sentence.

The business to be in

The Great Flood of 2008 and its aftermath are officially behind us: the plumbing & heating contractor came by this morning with the bill for all the work he did for us in the basement this week - new furnace, new water heater, new thermostat - so I just wrote a check in the amount of 2.7 of my paychecks. Ouch.

Decline and fall?

Three posts from Glenn Reynolds today made me think of ancient Rome's decline.

By the way, we're back home now and online after a small tornado, downed trees and power lines in our yard, floods, trips to the emergency room, drowned basement appliances, no hot water or air conditioning, and an extended motel stay waiting for a/c and hot water. All fixed now - infrastructure is in good hands in Small Town, Illinois.

Noah MacGyver

The basement flooded early this morning and somehow, thank God, the breaker tripped & shut off the power down there. It's the deepest I've seen it with still, dark, dirty standing water over the last step of the stairs. The hot water heater and the furnace are partially underwater, and with no power the sump pump isn't pumping water out to the flooded yard. Which is probably good, all things considered.

One of the causes of this round of flooding was a faulty downspout that poured a cascade of water right down on the ground beside the basement wall. I went out in the storm to take a look with the old anxious homeowner's eye and saw the problem, then spent half an hour in the downpour rigging up & monitoring a drainage system worthy of MacGyver. The junk in the garage yielded an old spice rack and a kids' inflatable swimming pool - the spice rack is now under the L bend of the downspout to send water shooting out away from the house into the deflated pool, which extends from the spout out to lower ground in the north yard. After a few minutes of that the north yard was under about 4 inches of water from the old garden area to the neighbor's yard.

That was round one, now over Indianapolis. Here comes round two, now over Peoria and heading east. Oh, and we're under a tornado watch and a severe thunderstorm warning:

Ringo's clothes

Jane Espenson has a cool story here about how she wound up with a box of Ringo Starr's clothes. Followup here.