Potential Energy

I might never post to my blog if I didn't keep getting tagged. This particular incarnation is strange and arbitrary, but I'll give it a try.

There's a handful of books on my nightstand at the moment, all of which I'm currently reading. Most of them have page 123, but none of them have 5 paragraphs on that page. So sometimes the 5th paragraph on page 123 is actually the 2nd paragraph on page 124, if you catch my drift. In at least one case, the concept of "paragraph" doesn't quite apply. So, I'm going to give you a sampling:

"Maureen."

Nick Hornby, "A Long Way Down"

Dennis and I are eating an early lunch at an Italian restaurant near the beach. We are the only customers, and it's way too quiet for the conversation going on at our table. Whenever the waiter appear to refill our water glasses, I pause, as though we were discussing something top secret or desperately personal. Shanahan seems not to care. The waiter will be grinding pepper on my salad for what seems like a week, and Dennis is going, "...used a scallop trawler to recover some of the smaller remains..."

Mary Roach, "Stiff"

Answer 5.8-- (August 1968): Any angle can be bisected with a compass and straightedge. By repeated bisections we can divide any angle into 2, 4, 8, 16,... equal parts. If any number in this series is a multiple of 3, then repeated bisection obviously would allow trisection of the angle with compass and straightedge. Since this has been proved impossible, no number in the doubling series is evenly divisible by 3.

Martin Gardner, "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems"

Look at all those ants.

(Calvin, to Hobbes) Bill Watterson, "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" Book 2

It's amazing if you just look at ads, and then you see how people talk about them in the meetings. Amazing. There are actually guys in the meetings sitting around, going, "Well, Jim, I think the reason she should hold the scrubbing brush at this angle is-- yada, yada, yada." They're so careful about everything, like is this woman couple of years too old? Or is she too fat? Or too thin? They worry and they worry and they worry, and they get it fucking wrong every time. Every time.

(Josh Williams, Advertising Executive) from "Gig" edited by John Bowe et al

Though an early employee of Netscape ended up with a financial jackpot, those rewards weren't enough to hold its team together. Toy left as the company's suffocation by Microsoft (and its own mistakes) began to look inevitable, and took a break from the software business. In early 2003, he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to return, but the opportunity at OSAF fit every item on his dream job checklist: "I like the idea of working on software that millions of people will use, that will be on everyone's desktop. I think that the browser failed in its promise in a certain way, because a browser says that the only thing interesting to do with information is to look at it... But it turns out that as soon as you have the browser, your next step is to organize and communicate information, and browsers never picked up that interesting problem even when it became obvious right away that that was going to be the deal. And so it's the problem that, since 1995 and a half, has been interesting to me to go solve. But I don't know about the pressure to do a crappy job in a hurry. It'd be nice if we had some luxury to do a better job, right? And it'd be great to do it in open source."

Scott Rosenberg, "Dreaming in Code"