sj's Longest Now [v.1]

World wide words… with a brief but well-referenced entry in wiktionary. 

Check this solar carrier bag.   Remember the world’s finest turtle face-mask.  And forget not, while in the Christmas spirit, the joys of EVEST v.3 and all its kith.  Your relatives, young and old, will salute you.

Notes…

http://gayrepublicanmetalheadwiccans.org/

Randyf, Amanda/mal, michael, chris, j, erica…
shekhar, skyler, manon (u. chicago, admin computing, via shekhar)
ronaldo (hls, working for prof on how bloggers should be treated for
1st amendment)  — listen to/speak to some bloggers…  rob woolf.  m. leach.

Replace Wikipedia with media or The Media and you’ll be all set.  Let’s rock.

Jan-Henrik Anderson’s brightly colored art depicting quarks and similarly-sized subatomic particles is a glory to behold.  Starting from the shared superstructure of a unit superquadric ellipsoid, he has built some magical things, and intends to continue in the same fashion.

Sometime after 11:50
last night, I received a pointer to a delightful paper on medieval
mathematics
of the RaLBaG. 
Two charming stories in one night, one
library staffer, and a Simonson!  Now the question is : did the
story about the internal circumfrence and external diameter come from
him directly, or from Nehemiah as suggested in the History of Pi?

Time for a hallowe’en recipe contest.

It’s better than talking down to people.  Short uninformative
announcements that avoid the real issues may work as patches to
problems, but they avoid the heart of matters

Safest… hmmm.  Everyone should go visit John Conwell on Valerie Street in Bellaire to see a little well-conceived safety. (via Dan Feldstein)

Schools to open again next Wednesday – what a long vacation! – and airports to start reopening by Sunday.

Startup school : Coming this October 15th to a Science Center near you.  Sign up early if you want to come in person!

In 1870, Indianola, Texas
was growing rapidly; a coastal town with 5,000 inhabitants.  Then
in 1975 it suffered the first of two massive storms, killing hundreds
and flattening the city.  It was rebuilt; but a second storm in
1886 caused residents to give it up altogether.  Today, thanks to
storm erosion, most of the original city is underwater.

In 1900, Galveston
had enjoyed even greater growth without disaster.  It had a
population of 42,000.  The city had worried about facing the same
fate as Indianola, but as decades passed without any serious storms at
all, some experts (including then-director of the Galveston Weather Bureau, Isaac Cline) suggested that hurricanes “could not” hit Galveston, for one reason or another.

That fall, an unnamed hurricane swept through town, killing around
8,000 people and flattening the city.  There were communication
problems back then… bridges and telegraph lines were cut, making it
hard to send messages to the mainland.  Once messengers did
arrive, they had a great deal of bureaucracy to negotiate, despite the
extraordinary damage.

When rescuers arrived, they found thousands dead, instead. 
Funeral pyres were set up all around the city, and burned for
weeks. 

Since then, over the following century, the city has built up a 17-foot
high seawall, and raised the city some 4-5 meters with dredged
sand.  The seawall itself has become a tourist attraction, and
hotels and other tourist sites have been built along its length…
buildings along the main Galveston Strand are marked to indicate they
survived the hurricane.  So far, this has sufficed…

Losing to nature

The pending storm produced by Hurricane Rita
boasts sea surges of over 30 feet (some have suggested 50), making the
seawall seem rather slender protection.  Galveston has built out
towards the water, not back away from it; and the whole city has fled
before the potential disaster. 

If history is any indicator, it will take another storm of similar size to change anyone’s habitation habits.  But perhaps architects and developers will learn to be more respectful to nature in laying out groundplans and designing seaside retreats.