Happy Birthday Snowspinner. An abundant age.

Vuelta? What 'Vuelta'?

My 83-year old father fell off the steps today. He didn't exactly fall down the stairs. He was standing on the second step to reach a bit of hardware, then forgot that the was 18" off the ground and turned around to walk away ( Read more... )

The headline reads "Federal judge orders end to wiretap program." I, for one, have taken great personal comfort in this program; it gave me the illusion that somebody was listening when I talk.

So, which of these would give you the most stress ( Read more... )

So, I'm 800 miles from home, traveled by plane, and they've called another Red Alert to make travelling miserable. Knoxville hasn't been a terror center since 1864 ( Read more... )

For 13 days now I've been in Santa Cruz, California with 71 very highly talented middle school students doing MathPath. That's mathematics almost all day, almost every day. There's a little soccer and table tennis, some trips to the beach, and some college dining hall food mixed in, but it's a group where mathematics is always a popular topic ( Read more... )

When I was a little boy we lived on a farm. This was an old, shabby, badly-built pre-WWII farmhouse balanced precariously on a "foundation" of loose rocks. It was drafty and crooked and the windows cracked because it was gradually twisting. We had indoor running water, a cold-water hand pump in the kitchen, but an outdoor toilet, aka outhouse ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I heard Noam Elkies, one of the world's great mathematicians, whistle one voice of the round "Frere Jacques" while humming the second voice.

Life here has seemed to be at about a million miles an hour this week ( Read more... )