Winter’s Haven

The Economist brings us an article about some very cool biologically inspired architecture.

PZ points out a video showing a squid giving birth to hundreds of tiny offspring. Truly wonderous.

In case you missed it, there was a terrorist incident at Los Angeles International airport last week. Care to guess what notorious group was responsible?

As should be [...]

Does anyone have advice on finding prints of paintings by relatively obscure artists? I’m trying to find prints of the work of Lin Onus; Onus isn’t actually that obscure, although he isn’t a household name. I saw his painting “Gathering Storm” at the Seattle Art Museum just before I moved, and I’ve been trying to [...]

I’ve made a number of changes to my blog’s theme. The header has been completely overhauled. The photograph I used to create the header image was taken by Ernst Schütz and is used with his permission (thanks!). Ernst took the photo from the slopes of Mount Vilan in Switzerland; it is entitled Peace in Blue-White [...]

I recently discovered some truly delicious cookies on the store self: Kashi Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies. The problem is that they are moderately expensive, and I’m hooked. Although I am a decent cook, I have very little experience baking. Does anyone know how to reverse engineer a cookie?

The Koch Snowflake is a fractal, and, as you can see, two sizes of Koch Snowflakes in a 1:3 ratio of areas tile the plane. (Kudos to Eric Weisstein’s Mathworld for bringing the latter fact to my attention.)
For those of you now wondering, “what are fractals, anyway?” or “what does it even mean for a [...]

You may have noticed that it has been quite a while since I last posted. As far as my own life is concerned, I’m still unemployed and broke. And cursed.
I am actually starting to make some improvements to the website, however. As you likely noticed, I got rid of the long-standing “Under Construction” notice on [...]

One of the first things I plan to do once I become fabulously rich is to hire a personal orchestra to follow me around and play appropriate background music. For example, I am, right now, handily knocking out nasty technical math problems. And while math is certainly its own reward, think how much better it [...]

The problem: It’s cold and wet outside, and my desire go to cycling has consequentially disappeared.
The solution: Dance to progressive rock (such as this, or this, or this). It’s fun, fast, and exhausting. Also, figuring out how to dance to “experimental” music can be a challenge in itself.

Graffiti doesn’t seem to be a very big problem in Seattle, so I was more than a little surprised the first time I spotted this van (pictured above) parked on a quiet residential street on Beacon Hill. At second glance, it became clear the graffiti artist behind this striking sight was also the van’s owner. [...]

In the course of my efforts to design an original theme for this blog, I went searching for snowflake photos; what I found was quite beyond what I had been looking for. Ken Libbrecht of Caltech has an amazing website devoted to the the physics of snowflakes and ice crystal formation. His lab does a [...]