Apparently Lego is now selling a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. They’re making a few other architectural models, like the Guggenheim and the White House, though they’re much simpler.

I’d love to see them try to implement something by Frank Gehry, but I won’t hold my breath.

The unspeakable shame felt here by Asimo’s quality assurance team is the main reason that I don’t want to be a test engineer.

Also, orientation starts tomorrow. Woo!

Looks like everyone’s favorite contemporary opera is going to be performed in Manhattan this February.

So… is anyone free in six months? =)

Purported professional pencil sharpener David Rees invites you to “reacquaint yourself with the pleasures of a hand-sharpened pencil.”

A man who is always asking, “Is what I do worth while?” and “Am I the right person to do it?” will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve.

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. … It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind — we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.

¹ The usual formulation of Hardy’s rule is that, “if a mathematician’s going to do any significant work, it’ll be done before they’re thirty.” This is true so long as we ignore the later work of Archimedes, Cauchy, Descartes, Euler, Fermat, Frege, Gauss, Hilbert, Newton, Peano, Poincare, Russell, von Neumann, Weierstrass, and most recently Andrew Wiles. I would guess that Hardy’s opinion on the matter was influenced by his relationship with the mathematical prodigy Ramanujan, who died at 33.

“I’ll take four oxen, and all the bullets $1600 ‘ll get me.”

He sat leaning on his cane and thinking that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree standing on a sunlit slope one could take that telegraph pole over there, and simultaneously he tried to remember what exactly he had just been talking about.

- Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense