Oooh, Heaven Is A Place On Earth

[austin_dern]

So, what do angels do all day? I wasn't particularly looking for trouble when I started thinking about this, and I can't really say I've found any trouble, but it has been one of those little things that's nagged at me for literally minutes and who knows when it'll end.

And the remainder is of course over at my humor blog, where you can find my ruminations on all this. Also running over there since last week --- is a weekly summary thing like this good for people or should I post links as I write them, the way I do for the mathematics blog? --- and Newton's Prank have been:

• A Fool He Was.com, my battle against a piece of obvious click-bait.
• Oh, Weather, No, a cry of despair about the winter.
• Koko the Clown: Koko Bubbles, a silent cartoon from Max and Dave Fleischer that, uncharacteristically, is a bit weird.
• And, The Comics, pointing to the mathematics-themed comics of the week, plus some more.
• Another View Of The United States, a Statistics Saturday bit comparing the United States to other nations.
• My January 2014 Popularity Contest, monthly statistics.

Trivia: Innsbruck, Austria, spent only $148 million for the 1976 Winter Olympic Games (it was able to reuse many of its facilities from 1964), compared to about $250 million in 1968 by Grenoble and over one billion in 1972 for Sapporo. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Nancy Drew And The Women Who Created Her, Melanie Rehak.

PS: The Liquefaction of Gases, Part I --- reblogging an interesting statistical mechanics piece because it's interesting and that's plenty of reason.

Comments

[resonant.livejournal.com]

The picture of the Paris Motor Show of 1910 is amazing - I didn't know they could span such large spaces with such thin structural members at the time.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Isn't that, though? Victorian/Edwardian engineering, especially civil engineering, has this popular image of being incredible and massive chunks of metal and stone. That there's this gossamer side is easy to forget.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Of course, as they didn't understand fatigue cracking or Euler buckling, there might be a very practical reason why we don't see such airy structures surviving to our era.