Design by Committee

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US currency is ugly, and the new $5 bill, which entered circulation a few weeks ago, especially so. A purple “5” on a green bill? Fugly. The fun thing about visiting other countries is seeing currency and coinage that looks interesting. I never realized how bland US currency was until I did my postdoc in Canada, and after only a few months away had trouble telling US bills apart.

New British coins are out, and IMO they look awesome. Compare and contrast the artistic value with our new fiver.

Update: John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes

When I commented on the ugly new U.S. five dollar bill the other day, several readers wrote in to argue that the bill should not be criticized, because some of the changes which have made it uglier were made for the benefit of people with low vision. That’s bullshit. Accessibility is an important and worthy goal, but it is not at odds with good design. We should settle for nothing less than beautiful and accessible currency. This isn’t it.

Get Helvetica off our money

Oh Crap, it's the Day After Mar 31

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Your April Fool’s Day Joke Continues to Suck

… I get called a curmudgeon, or lambasted for having no sense of humor. And every year, the jokes online get lamer and lamer.

Ditto for me, and anyone who knows me knows I am not humorless. I’m of the opinion that a good prank need not be limited to one day in the year. This is the one day I probably won’t ever pull a prank — it’s amateur day. A good prank is almost like “The Sting”

You gotta KEEP your con even after you take his money, he can’t know you took him

Jury Duty

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I’ve been summoned for jury duty. While I hope I get an interesting case, like one involving entropy cops arresting someone for violating the second law of thermodynamics, or the symmetry squad nailing someone on a CPT violation, I know I won’t. They always seem to plead those out.

UPDATE: Much ado about nothing for the first day — I’m still on call for next week. Lots of sitting around and waiting, until finally called in as one of the B-list prospective jurors for one trial, and caught the second half of the voir dire. They ended up with 12 from the original crowd, and apparently all the other trials were done selecting by the time the lunch break was over. So I was set free a couple of hours early.

But I did hear the prosecutor warn that CSI, Law & Order (duh DUH, or is it DUH duh?), et. al are TV, and the jury shouldn’t presume anything from TV would carry over into reality. And the defense’s line of questioning spelled out what the defense strategy would be, and I’m pretty sure that I would have been excused.

The Ralph Mellish Effect

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Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Ralph Mellish looked down. But one glance confirmed his suspicions. Behind a bush, on the side of the road, there was *no* severed arm. No dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties. No head in a bag. Nothing. Not a sausage.

And now for something completely different: a water balloon not exploding in high-speed

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via Talk Like a Physicist

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

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Lightning and the Runaway Breakdown Theory at the At the Speed of Light! blog.

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Oh, and here’s another link, in case you were thinking the title was a reference to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

“The Barents sea heaved and churned like a tortured animal in pain, the howling wind tearing packets of icy green water from the shuddering crests of the waves, atomizing it into mist that was again laid flat by the growing fury of the storm as Kevin Tucker switched off the bedside light in his Tuba City, Arizona, single-wide trailer and by the time the phone woke him at 7:38, had pretty much blown itself out with no damage.”