Ron Graham

From an interview of Ron Graham in Mathematical People (one of the books Kara Lynn sent):

"You can start to get mad at a problem," he says. "Did you ever see a Daffy Duck cartoon? When a few bad things happened to Daffy—Elmer Fudd or somebody blows him up in a number of different ways—he says, `Of course, you know this means war!' And you often get a very appealing, attractive problem that gets under your skin. You're living the problem, it's a part of you, it's always in the background, running. In some sense this means war. It's kind of life or death."

From Slashdot

Infinityis (807294) writes:

Maybe Winzip and Ziplock should merge. I think it'd be nice to have encrypted, password protected sandwich bags, but at 90% compression, I think the bread might not taste so good afterwards.

nabokov

my ordeal interviewing nabokov

Polya Picture Album

Kara Lynn sent some of David's books:

The Polya Picture Album is a good one. I'd looked at it in libraries and the bookstore a few times. It's nice to have a copy. Polya died just as I arrived at Stanford for graduate school, in 1985. They have some interesting Polya displays in the Math library at Stanford, including a postcard from G. H. Hardy challenging Polya to identify the source of the quotation, "Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone."

This is an easy one in the days of Google. Hardy wrote the answer on the bottom of the postcard: Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Santa's big red sack

From a review by Manohla Dargis [cool name!] of the movie "Polar Express," in today's NYT:

I suspect that most moviegoers care more about stories and characters than how much money it took for a digitally rendered strand of hair to flutter persuasively in the wind. Nor will they care that to make "Polar Express" Tom Hanks wore a little cap that transmitted a record of his movements to a computer, creating templates for five different animated characters.

It's likely, I imagine, that most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters' faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus's North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of "machinery and tall chimneys" in Dickens's "Hard Times." Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

I wondered—"Manohla Dargis?" A man's name, or a woman's? A pseudonym? In any case, it cried out to be anagrammed.

MIRA HOAGLANDS—Aha. I was right. Must be a woman.

OLDISH ANAGRAM—Maybe not. Since I use anagrams as a sort of divination (heh), this led me to reconsider.

OMAHA DARLINGS—A secret society of movie reviewers? More evidence that it must be a woman's name.

HADAL ORGANISM [Hadal: Of or relating to the deepest regions of the ocean, below about 6,000 meters (20,000 feet)]. Not a person at all perhaps, but a new life form?