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The BTP posits that it's possible to take a solid sphere, cut it into pieces, rearrange the pieces using nothing more than rotation and translation, and then re-assemble them into two identical copies of the original sphere. "In other words," www.kiro5hin.org explains, "you've doubled the volume of the original sphere."
And then my head explodes. Not my real head—just a mathematical model of my head.
JA captured the image: I watch as Michael Bishop works with a dirty pot. Robert Baird sits in the hotspot. Lukas Lipinski monitors the session.
***
There's a simple note taped to the glass door. In black magic marker, it tells you, RING BELL FOR AVATAR STUDIOS.
I had just finished my bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. There was nothing left to do. And so:
I
rang
the bell.
I wondered if there was someone, somewhere, in front of a monitor, finger poised on a buzzer, watching me as I waited. I didn't have to wait very long at all…
Over at Popular Science, there's a post about a gargantuan "cruise blimp" that just seems too cool to ever get built. Check out the illustration of the observation deck—it's like an irony-free Bruce McCall illo, which is kind of disorienting.
Maybe just better run. Mark Thoma at Economist's View has some thoughts. So do his readers.
Mostly because the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum had Julia Child do a hilarious Julia Child parody for its "Life on Other Worlds" exhibit, in which she "made" primordial soup. Still, sorry to see this theory go.
Computerworld posts a fascinating interview with J. Presper Eckert, who co-invented the first practical all-electronic computer—a tube computer.
Some things never change. "ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes. The tubes were off the shelf; we got whatever the distributor could supply in lots of a thousand. We used 10 tube types, but could have done it with four tube types; we just couldn't get enough of them."
English, she is a funny language as she is spoke. But strangest by far is the odd bunch of words we use to connote groups of animals. A chain of bobolinks? A nuisance of cats? A raft of otter? A mob of kangaroo—wait, shouldn't that be a court of kangaroo?
Over at EFF's Deep Links Fred von Lohmann has posted news that nearly caused me to stroke out at my keyboard. Basically, the RIAA has submitted a document to the triennial review of the DMCA, stating that "the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted [does not] necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization." In other words, they've changed their mind since last year, when RIAA mouthpiece Don Verilli told the Supreme Court, "The record companies . . . have said, for some time…