Random knowledge

“How many possible ways are there to lace an average shoe?” The author presents 31 methods he considers “worthy of devoting the time required to create instructions.” Includes illustrations, and information about shoelace knots, aglets (”the plastic or metal sleeves at the ends of shoelaces”) repair, and shoelace length formulas.
Via

Lynne McLandsborough, a professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, explains this oft-observed kitchen conundrum.

Spammers are sending emails with pdf attachments and my anti-spam software doesn’t detect them

FRANKFURT, July 25 — Ulrich Mühe, a popular German actor who won acclaim as a tormented Stasi officer in cold-war East Germany in the Oscar-winning film “The Lives of Others,” died on Sunday in his family home in Walbeck. He was 54. Report in the NYT.

My previous post about Das Leben der Anderen

The Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione or ‘Imaginary Prisons’), is a series of 16 prints produced by Giovanni Piranesi (link partly in Italian, partly in English - large image database) that show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines.

While humankind has left over 170,000 kg of Earth on the Moon, only 382 kg of the Moon has been returned to Earth by Apollo and Luna missions.

And there is also a list of artificial objects on the Moon, focusing mainly on the large chunks of hardware. It’s by no means an exhaustive inventory of things left on the moon, although such a list would probably be possible.

Also on Venus and on Mars we left a series of things behind.

RK sez: we don’t live there and pollution already started. Humans.

Said as “sixteen-sixty-one.”
n., a woman who is said to look 16 years old from the back but 61 years old from the front; an older woman who dresses in fashions meant for young women. And vice versa ? (Read in the DTD)

Mathematically speaking, some infinities are bigger than others, such as the infinity of numbers with decimals in them exceeding that of counting numbers (1,2,3,4…). The easy introduction at Sciam. A fact proven already in the 19th century by Georg Cantor using set theory. See e.g. also Cantor’s theorem. Or you might like to read up on infinity.

Isn’t mathematics amazing ?

Prominent Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Russia’s turbulent history, Putin’s version of democracy and his attitude to life and death. Spiegel interview.
The Gulag Archipelago. Read it some odd 25 years ago. Quite impressive literature.

What is best ? LibraryThing or Book Collector ? I need to have a closer look at this by comparing the free trial versions. Time, my dear, time. But now I’m enjoying Venice for 2 days (a quick visit from Spain following an invitation).

Holiday period from 02 July till 20 July in Spain. Sun, water and books.

After reading several reviews I finally decided to buy Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Good introductory article