Did Gauss want the 17-gon on his tombstone, or not?

link

Translations of "Lord Voldemort" to other languages

an exercise in anagramming

wikipedia

Not a Word

From the New Yorker (link):
* * * *
Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you'll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled "Flags Up!" Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die "at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine."

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. "It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright," Richard Steins, who was one of the volume's editors, said the other day. "If someone copied Lillian, then we'd know they'd stolen from us..."

First day of school

Mysterious energy being, reprise

I hestitate to include this screenshot photo of the energy being, because it makes it look like a flashbulb.

Look at the IPIX photo at whitehouse.gov yourself to get a much better look.

Mysterious energy-being photographed during Bush's 2003 state of the union address

Scroll this IPIX photo backward and toward the right from its initial perspective of the chamber. You'll see the energy-being in the second row from the back, floating conspicuously on the right-hand side. It's not just a glowing aurora—it seems to have some sort of internal structure or skeleton that is a yellowish color.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/sotu2003-ipix.html

Remember—you heard it from me first. This is not a "I read this on BoingBoing and thought I would pass it on" kind of blog entry. Oh no. I just discovered it myself.