"Fractal wrongness": the definition appears in the middle of a lexicon of computing, but could apply to many non-computing situations too.

This coming Thursday, June 3rd, a friend of mine will be "celebrating" his 60th birthday by doing 600 sit-ups. Well, it's a long story. But if you happen to be in the vicinity of Adelaide's Rundle Mall that day, wander past the pigs at noon and you should see a spectacle.

Spam of the week: someone is trying to sell me "qualitative watches". It would be fun to have a timepiece that offered no numbers, just comments like "it's getting on towards lunchtime", but I suspect they wouldn't actually live up to the description.

Saw Avatar yesterday. Was disappointed that they didn't have a 3D font for the closing credits.

Rereading Norstrilia. It's like Crocodile Dundee only better.

My Amazon order arrived yesterday. Usually I prefer to buy things one at a time from a local bookshop, since having twelve new books turn up on the same day is a little overwhelming. They arrived in a sack! I've never held an actual sack of books before. But sadly, not one of these titles is to be seen on the shelf in any bookshop I know of in ( Read more... )

xkcd's tribute to Geocities: catch it while it's hot, it won't stay this way for ever (we sincerely hope).

This is Harold M. Edwards on the quest for the zeros of Riemann's zeta function:
No doubt this program of computation would have been carried further if World War II had not intervened. By the time the war was over, the computer revolution was well under way and automatic electronic digital computers were rapidly being developed. These new tools ( Read more... )

I've just sent in my registration for AustMS 2009.

Suddenly, ABC radio seem to like me. My recital from last year is to be broadcast on Sunday morning, June 7th (or maybe late Saturday night, depending on your time zone). People outside Australia can go to the ABC web site and listen to the streaming version if they're interested ( Read more... )