(1) Bill Gosper writes:
Thane, hie your family over to Jade Palace and order the (finger shaped) roast pork flake pastries. Also, do you want to try Veit's 14er?
We were there for lunch today, but unfortunately Veit Elser's 14-disk aluminum packing puzzle had moved on. Maybe Bill has it again. Cheny Xu, the Jade Palace proprietor, made us five disk-shaped beef things as a consolation prize, but before I thought of taking a photo of their careful pentagonal packing on the serving dish, we'd eaten three of them already:
(2) Tom Rodgers mailed me copies of several G4G8 articles, each signed by Martin Gardner (!). He visited Martin in Norman, Oklahoma a few weeks ago. Thank you Tom!
(3) Granta in today's mail: The Rise of the British Jihad. Opening it at random to page 70, I read
On February 20, MI5 officers secretly recorded Omar Khyam at home talking to another man about obtaining detonators for a bomb. Coincidentally, on the same day, a member of staff at Access Self Storage telephoned the police to report his suspicions about the contents of the lock-up. Counterterroist police officers arrived the next morning and, on finding the 600-kilogram bag of fertilizer, took samples for laboratory analysis. The ammonium nitrate explosive was switched for an identical-looking inert substance and surveillance cameras were installed in the lock-up to catch conspirators when they returned.
Now, I'm generally a War on Terror Skeptic, but I do enjoy a good read. Highly recommended.
(4) Underneath a pile of now-discarded t-shirts, a long-missed copy of Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality. I'd wondered what happened to this book. I actually liked this book a lot after I started flipping through it over a year ago, and much more than I thought I would; it's nice to have it back. It's written at about just the right level for me, and I think it represents an excellent effort by Penrose not to "dumb it down," but instead to describe how he actually organizes physical concepts in his own brain. So, again, highly recommended.
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