I recently entered two different poetry competitions on the Internet. Real competitions, with prizes and everything. One called for limericks specifically, while the other was for short poetry of any form, but I entered limericks for both because I like limericks.
Which do you want to hear about first? The one in which I won a prize, or the other one?
Lately I’ve been thinking relatively seriously about getting some decent video recording equipment, but in the meantime I can make very simple recordings using my digital camera or mobile phone. My phone lets me record fifteen seconds of unenviable quality, and it is definitely a challenge to record anything worth seeing in that time.
I have risen to that challenge in the video below, which showcases the fractal tray that I painted a number of years ago. What do you think? Would you like to see more short videos of this kind?
Here are some interesting things that have caught my attention in the last fortnight:
It’s fun to be whimsical, and one way to achieve that is to take a topic – however silly – and write about it, simply as an exercise to see where it leads and what angles can be illuminated on the journey. Now, various people have expressed the notion that mathematics would be a lot simpler if only pi were exactly three, and there are even stories in which the idea of pi being equal to three forms part of the plot (one modern example being Going Postal by Terry Pratchett). So it occurs to me that it might be fun to imagine a world in which pi really is equal to three, and to mentally explore some of the consequences.
I was just putting the fresh vegetables into the fridge when …
This is why we really, really need to repeal gravity.
It is now a couple of days after my 32nd birthday (June 12). Not everyone I invited turned up, several were late, and one checked in briefly but couldn’t stay, but the eight or nine of us remaining had a really good time. The only disappointment was that there should have been twelve of us.
Writing a series like this, it’s not possible to be consistent. Sometimes I’m in a very discerning mood, and hardly anything seems remarkable enough to include. Other times I feel fascinated by just about everything I read, and the task of filtering out all but the most worthy discoveries is more than I can bear. These moods tend to come in waves: I can be in one state or the other for several days at a time before becoming, as it were, tired of it, and switching to the opposite state of mind.
I like to be as consistent as I can, though, which is why I don’t publish installments more than twice a month (I need enough time for my conservative and liberal moods to average out) and why I list provisional nominations on Twitter as an intermediate filtering stage. For most of the last fortnight I’ve been in a particularly conservative mood, but then along came the nominees for the 3QD Prize in Science, and I couldn’t read a collection of 171 science articles from the last year without coming across some new and interesting facts.
Here are some things that I found interesting over the last couple of weeks.
So, in the process of trying to solve the commenting issue discussed in my previous post, I’ve upgraded to Firefox 3. This is something I’d been putting off until absolutely necessary, because of the effort involved in updating extensions and finding replacements. However, I’ve managed to find satisfactory updates or replacements for all of them.
This is more of a public service announcement than a regular blog post. It is intended to draw attention to a problem, in the hope that doing so will lead to a solution.
The problem is that I’m unable to leave comments on certain blogs in the Blogspot/Blogger domain. The problem is not with most such blogs, but only with a few of them. Details follow.
[Update: the only solution I've found is to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. See the comments section beneath this post for more information.]
I’ve never used any blogging platform other than WordPress, so I don’t know how they work from the administrator’s point of view. However, I’ve noticed that people using Blogspot have a variety of options for the enabling of comments. Whether I am able to leave a comment on a given Blogspot blog depends on the commenting form the owner has selected.
