The whole presentation was wonderful. Some awsometastic person has posted all of it; this clip is part 10 of 10 as you can see. Anyway, this clip contains my favorite portion of the presentation. He fields a question asking as you are the current "face of science" for this generation, who is your favorite of the previous faces of science: Sagan, Burke, Clarke, etc. His story about Carl Sagan made me cry. I wanted to marry Sagan when I was five. :)

Start around 3:30 for the question and his beautiful response.




Through some lucky turn of chance, I timed returning home just in time to catch him on Book TV. :)

I finished Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves by Clifford A. Pickover. It is probably one of the weirdest books I've ever read. I liked parts of it - anything dealing with wordplay, vocabulary, and Proust. ( But there are large chunks of the book I'm not sure about. )

My favorite portion of the book, on page 63 he talks about the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians who play with constrained writing. He gave Mike Keith's version of The Raven encoded as pi. Each word in the poem corresponds to a digit, going to the first 740 decimals.

3.1415926535897932384626433832795?288419716

Poe, E.
"Near a Raven"
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap -- the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This," I whispered quietly, "I ignore."

Also, as I was searching for pi's numbers I found this really cool website that just sings pi.

And, yes, it was sheer laziness of me to try to google pi as opposed to counting the numbers in each of the words of the poem. I am lazy. What of it?

More pictures from my NY trip - horses, giant tree trunks, octogenarians I want to be like when I grow up, my uncle's museum, ice cream, ice cream, fish and chips and ice cream, somewhat successful force perspective, and stores you really shouldn't visit ever.

( More New York Pictures behind the cut )

Meanwhile I'm trying to decide if I like the new Ms Marple. Haven't decided yet. She looks a bit too much like Florence Henderson to me, and while that shouldn't affect my judgement I keep picturing the Brady Bunch and it's taking me out of the story. Watching this, I want toast and I want tea. I want tea and toast.