Pinnacle Foods Corportation – New Vlasic Products What kind of half freaked GMO lab makes pickles that do this?
eye – Au vieux cruller – 12.05.02 An entry in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French explains how the now- legendary and sometimes theme-parked caf�s of Paris were, during the Enlightenment, “places where new or subversive ideas could be fairly openly discussed (though police spies haunted them).” Later, they became home to the bohemians, some of whom called themselves “the water drinkers” because that was all they could afford. Later still, the Caf� de Flore in St.-Germain-des-Pr�s became the hangout for Sartre and Beauvoir and the world headquarters for existentialist thought chiefly because, according to a history of …
For my friends Birgitt and Ward who suffered through a bad ice storm in North Carolina last week: Birches by Robert Frost When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay. Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed …
AKMA’s Random Thoughts: Illich and Us, and Miscellanea As a homeschooling parent, I marked Ivan Illich’s death earlier this week with sadness. So did AKMA who went on to discuss these great homeschooling strategies Then too, we haven�t deployed elaborate stratified appointed-hours lesson plans to impose order on our young ones. We simply made space in which they might learn (a shade easier in our context, as we don�t watch television at home). They read, and read, and take classes that interest them outside our home, and read, and do interesting stuff. (One of our favorite tactics has been leaving …
The Tesseract – a 4-dimensional cube Hypercube is a multidimensional analogue of a 3-dimensional cube in that each coordinate of a point in a hypercube is restricted to the same 1-dimensional (line) segment. Tesseract is a 4-dimensional hypercube. In anticipation of MAM 2000, a remark by A. K. Dewdney served an additional reason to write about the tesseract. Wrote he, “Dimensions seem to creep up in everywhere as HYPERCUBE is written.” Dewdney was referring to matrices (2-dimensional objects) and vectors (1-dimensional objects) that are part of any modern computer language. They are also handy in describing and manipulating multidimensional objects. …