Swans on Tea

Physicists of the 20th Century on Banknotes (pdf)
Feynman on the $20! Feynman on the $20!
It’ll never happen. We’re too stodgy about this in the States, and we do some ugly things with our currency.
a reminder, via Kottke

I remember reading about this last January, and now I see via Bee at Backreaction that it’s in the news again.
Floating banana’s appeal for funding slips
Despite getting about $105,000 from Quebec and federal art-funding agencies, Canadian artist Cesar Saez’s flying-banana project appears to be meeting turbulence. According to his project’s webpage, the Geostationary Banana Over [...]

Edgy comic George Carlin dies in L.A. at age 71
Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs, dirty words and the demise of humanity, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday. He was 71.
It had to happen sometime, but . . .

A cheese map of Canada, from strangemaps
Don’t complain about the bouzouki player.

Second power outage in two weeks. This time, 12 hours; came up about half hour ago. Stuff makes a bit of a racket when it all turns on at once.
Update: Power went out at work, briefly, in the offices in my part of the building. I’m cursed.

I “won” this a few summers ago at an arcade, after dropping about $5 in quarters into Skee-ball (and unDogmatically keeping the points for myself). I was on vacation, and Claire, a ~5 year-old staying a few doors down had won a similar Spidey inflatable Tombat (not its official name but certainly how it [...]

Kerning is the adjustment of the spacing between letter pairs in printing. Improperly done, (overkerning?) this can make letters run together, and e.g. “rn” is difficult to distinguish from “m,” especially for those of us with less-than-perfect eyesight. (And take care not to shove your “L” too close to your “I” since that [...]

Mechanization and Standardization
. . . and how some people resist it, thinking manual labor is best.
Given an infinite number of monkeys with Excel, you can produce the client reporting.
(And for those of you who live in 2007 where the idea of having human beings actually touching data is out of the misty past, I bring [...]

Power was restored just a few minutes ago and now I’m getting my blog fix. Some big frikkin’ trees went down — I just took a stroll to slay some food (I found many tracks; they lead to a place the locals call Mac-doh-nalls. Plentiful hunting, but I don’t think the walk negates [...]

Nasty storm hit yesterday, and there was no power when I got home . . . and none when I got up. Looks to be a tree down on the street, and I’m guessing it took the power line with it, and no opportunity to fix it in the dark. No lights, no [...]

How bold can Darth Vader be?
Font pun and typeface art. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

On the vagaries of random playlists on the iPod:
The transition from Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” to RHCP’s “Funky Monks” at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, before caffeine and not really fully awake, is a little harsh.
I’m just sayin’