Some more sheet music of arrangements of music by the incredible Yoko Kanno have become available. See these posts on the Gabriela Robin Yoko Kanno fan site.

(Cross-posted to yoko_kanno)

Modern Toilet Restaurant offers an unusual dining experience. Here's an excerpt from an article from Time magazine online called "Edible Excretions: Taiwan's Toilet Restaurant." (via Marginal Revolution)
"Every customer sits on a stylish acrylic toilet (lid down) designed with images of roses, seashells or Renaissance paintings. Everyone dines at ( Read more... )

The idea of giving up something for Lent came up in conversation and I remembered this limerick.
"A nun, Sister Mary, from Ghent
Had orgasms only in Lent.
     Her priest said. 'I know
     I said something forgo ..
But chastity's not what I meant.'" -- PeterW

I watched a Discovery Channel documentary called We Built This City: Paris. I found it fascinating.

Paris started out as a small trading settlement on an island in the middle of the river Seine. The location was chosen because it had natural barriers (the river) that made it more easily defensible. After a while, the Romans settled there and ( Read more... )

XKCD has a Sierpinski Valentine. Thanks to flying_squirrel for pointing it out.

Paul Martin gave a speech at the University of Waterloo on No Pants Day, an event run by the Computer Science Club, and was photographed with some students wearing funny hats and boxer shorts.

Someone has started a website for people over thirty to meet each other in Waterloo. ( Read more... )

This post on a survivalist forum by Ferfal about living in Argentina after the 2001 collapse of its economy gave me some food for thought. I particularly found interesting his ideas about what he would do in advance of an economic collapse, given what he knows now. He has a blog now, called Surviving in ArgentinaIn the post, there are some ( Read more... )

Stupid #!@#@#$ UPS. As Robert Sawyer says "Down with UPS!" I received two packages from them in two days, and was gouged for $40 and $30 brokerage fees respectively. The going rate for a brokerage fee at Canada Post is $5. To add insult to injury, they had me sign some sort of thing that said I gave them a power of attorney to accept packages ( Read more... )

A few things:

RIP Gottfried Mayer, founder of Complexity Digest.

I watched Leverage episode 1. I laughed at the rendition of Lady Macbeth's "Unsex me now!" speech. The bit of Shakespeare in the middle of that episode made it that much better for me. I would have liked the show anyway without it.

I found this blog post amusing.
Excerpt:
"There ( Read more... )

There was a pun involving a fractal in the puns community today, complete with an illustration of the fractal.
"I made a fractal today, and although it's more of a Sierpinski-type fractal, I'm a bigger fan of Mandelbrot, so I'm naming it Benoit Balls." -- mandydax

I was listening to Paul Kennedy, producer of CBC's Ideas, speak about why ideas matter on a podcast called Canadian Voices. (MP3 here, RSS here.) It's an interesting talk, and I recommend it. One of the things he mentioned that surprised me is that Machiavelli was best known in his own lifetime for writing pornography. He was a historian, and a ( Read more... )