I BLEED LIGHTENING
Here’s a thing. I don’t feel like saying anything else today.
Common Curta-sy
“WTF is a Curta?” you may be asking.
I’ll tell you!
The Curta is a little handheld mechanical calculator introduced in 1948 by Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark (so I guess “Curta” was an easier name than “Herzstarka”). Real-life ones look like THIS (source for pic)…
…and were considered the best portable calculators until the digital ones started coming out in the 1970s.
Its design is based in part off of…(wait for it)…Leibniz’ Step Reckoner. It is able to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and also square roots. What made it different from contemporary calculators was, though it employed a stepped drum mechanism like most others, Herzstark was able to create and patent a single drum that did the work of 10+ drums, thus making the Curta super compact.
I wanted to get a real one, but they’re like $400 now, so this simulator was a cool find. If you want to get all up in the Curta’s business but are intimidated by all the arrows/dials (it’s like a slide rule on steroids!), check out this manual.
Are all Aquarian baseball players pitchers?
Holy crap dudes, this is the best discussion of imaginary numbers I’ve ever heard. Listen to this, it’s really cool.
Green & Stokes
So in my continuing saga of “Let’s Make Stupid Jokes About Everything” (aka, “My Life”) and in the same vein as that Neil & Prey dream I had awhile back, I think someone should propose a detective/mystery show called Green & Stokes. It’d be like NUMB3RS crossed with Law & Order crossed with Columbo, except with exponentially more puns.
They’d work for the LAMD (Los Angeles Math Department) or something, because cities would have their own math departments in whatever universe that would allow Green and Stokes to be mathematicians AND detectives AND live during the same time period.
And the episode names could each be a pun on some other famous mathematician’s name (or other dumb puns).
- “Rolle with the Punches”
- “Out with the Old, in with the Newton”
- “Bourbaki and the Case of the Empty Set”
I DON’T EVEN KNOW.
This is why I need school to start again.
Edit: holy crap, I forgot how crappy gifs can be when they’re exported from Flash (especially when you don’t know what you’re doing), but here’s the theoretical show’s opening animation nonetheless:
Edit 2: fixed it (sort of; it’s still dumb)
Book Review: Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
Have I read this before: Yup! I read it in the spring of 2007. It was required for my Western Lit. class.
Review: Y’know, this was actually quite a bit better than I remember. And more upsetting. I don’t know why, but Kurtz really, really strikes me the same way that Pinbacker from Sunshine did. Still trying to make that connection make sense. Maybe it’s because in Sunshine, the crew of Icarus II only hears about the failed mission of Icarus I from recordings made by Pinbacker. In a way, readers are only privileged to learn about the African wilderness/ivory trading/horror through Marlow’s narration, which is centered on events surrounding Kurtz. It’s like these two characters who don’t make appearances until the very ends of their respective stories are actually responsible for the stories in the first place.
There’s also this shared experience of duality: you form an opinion about both Kurtz and Pinbacker based on what’s said about them. This opinion (likely) changes once the men are actually confronted.
Bah, I dunno. Still fleshing it out. But that’s the thing that really stuck out to me most when I read this again.
Rating: 6/10
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