Can lemmings cook?

( This lemming can... )

(From jilara. The cupboards and cookbooks are mostly the flower_cat's these days, but I contributed my share when we got married.)

The day so far

Spent much of the morning puttering. In this case, installing a couple of new coat hangers in the office.

Had a late breakfast/early lunch, and went out for my walk and some errands at about 1:30. Any benefit I got from the exercise was probably cancelled out by the fact that the Post Office is only a couple of blocks from Yum Yum Donuts. I had two (chocolate and maple French -- my favorites).

Walked for about an hour and twenty minutes on the Los Gatos Creek Trail. Twenty years ago I was working at Zilog, a short walk from a section of the trail that I rarely get to anymore. I am gradually getting back in shape.

Adventures in topology

The adventure starts with this post by jenkitty containing directions for knitting a Klein Bottle hat, ganked from this page on one-sided surfaces.

That, of course, immediately led me to remember this hat at the Acme Klein Bottle online store. Somewhere around here I recalled my friend Ted's amusing account of trying to commission a Klein Bottle from a glassblower in Germany. (He eventually succeeded.)

A few more links lead to the geometric topology section of the Geometry Junkyard, and an online book called Math That Makes You Go Wow: A Multi-Disciplinary Exploration of Non-Orientable Surfaces.

Finally, combining non-orientable surfaces with another of jenkitty's interests, I tracked down this appendix to The Ultimate Science Fiction Poetry Guide, which contained the correct text and attribution for a limerick I remembered reading in the December 1968 issue of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column of Scientific American: it's by the late science fiction author Cyril Kornbluth:

 A burleycue dancer, a pip
 Named Virginia, could peel in a zip;
     But she read science fiction
     And died of constriction
 Attempting a Mobius strip.

(The icon, BTW, is a 120-cell ganked from this Wikipedia article

W00t!

Just got a tracking number for my Vagabond gig bag! It should be here by the end of next week.

So I'll have a bag for my travel guitar that hopefully does not look like it contains an assault weapon. Since I'm travelling by air to GAFilk, this is a Good Thing.