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STRICKEN. 27 Aug 2013 | 04:09 am
Via Anatoly, this hilarious bit from the memoirs of the mathematician Ralph Boas: MR [i.e., Mathematical Reviews] sent me a paper by a Japanese author who kept referring to “stricken mass distributio...
THE UNGENTLE STEPMOTHER. 26 Aug 2013 | 07:20 am
I've finished Alexander Veltman's third novel, Svetoslavich: Vrazhii pitomets (Svetoslavich: The devil's foster child, 1835)—you can get a lot read in a four-hour bus ride—and I found it both satisfyi...
A TOUGH TYPO. 23 Aug 2013 | 06:56 pm
I'm off to NYC for the weekend to see some old friends (haven't been back since 2008), and I probably won't post again until Monday unless the return bus trip Sunday leaves me less enervated than I ex...
COUNTING LANGUAGES. 22 Aug 2013 | 08:39 pm
Arika Okrent has a nice piece picking out "14 interesting facts about language in the U.S." based on the Census Bureau's 2011 American Community Survey, from "1. Over 300 languages are spoken in the U...
THE MIDWAY PLAISANCE. 21 Aug 2013 | 10:30 pm
Via John Emerson's Facebook stream, I found this striking sentence: "The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is the patchwork-quilt, the Midway Plaisance, the national chain-gang of Europe; a state that is not ...
PASTERNAK'S VOICE. 20 Aug 2013 | 10:00 pm
Thanks to Irina Mashinski's Facebook page, I am able to pass on to you this ten-minute radio interview (in Russian) about the discovery of recordings of Pasternak reciting his verse (very impressively...
VELTMAN AND BERLIOZ. 20 Aug 2013 | 04:00 am
I was listening to the beginning of Hector Berlioz's supernally beautiful song "Le spectre de la rose" when a mad thought occurred to me: Berlioz was the Veltman of music, and Veltman was the Berlioz ...
ONE SHLYAG PER RALO. 19 Aug 2013 | 04:49 am
I'm reading my third Veltman novel (see previous posts on Strannik and Koshchei the Immortal), Svyatoslavich vrazhii pitomets: Diva vremyon krasnogo solntsa Vladimira [Svyatoslavich, the devil’s nurse...
HUMMEL, HUMMEL! 18 Aug 2013 | 01:01 am
I'm most of the way through Dennis Showalter's Tannenberg: Clash of Empires 1914 , one of those military history books that are way too detailed unless you happen to have an endless appetite for detai...
THE DAME OF DICTIONARIES. 16 Aug 2013 | 07:49 pm
Daniel Krieger has a wonderful piece at narrative.ly about Madeline Kripke, who has 20,000 books in her West Village apartment, most of them dictionaries: Kripke, who is sixty-nine, grew up in Omaha,...
