Two removals of the tophat are in order. The first for physicist John Wheeler, a minor hero of mine, and not only because he was the thesis advisor for a major hero of mine, Richard Feynman, but for a massive […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for Chatter
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Newton has some cause to be rather pissed off at Riemann. After all, without Riemann’s work on the mathematical foundations of non-Euclidean space, Einstein would have had a hard time of his own work, and Newton’s world system might have […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Well, I am emerging from the shadow of the opera, and thus am starting to have a bit more free time again and am able to post. But, the opera is not completely done with me yet. If anybody wants […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ulysses S. Grant had, all things considered, a terrible life. Between the Mexican and Civil Wars, he failed as a farmer, a bill collector, and a horse goods salesman. After the Civil War, as president he appointed and stuck by […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Geoff and I have a mutual love of deeply competent characters who purposefully appear utterly hopeless. So, it only made sense to have Drunk Uncle Ulysses be just a front for Sherlock Grant, the man who sees into the hearts […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It is true. I remember this old SNL sketch where Ronald Reagan would be bumbling his way thru photo-ops with children and kittens until everyone left. Then, he would press a secret button and everything would flip around like in […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Robert-Houdin is the only man I know of who won a political victory through the use of magic. Napoleon III had sent him to Algeria after some Arabic religious leaders started impressing the public with various tricks and using that […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Magicians! One of these days I’ll have Jasper Maskelyne and Carter the Great running around in here as well. According to “The War Magician”, Jasper Maskelyne pulled a similar stunt to Robert-Houdin’s bullet catching while engaged in a magical duel […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I really wanted to have Newton refer to the twinned pages from the book as a kind of ansible. However, I realized that since our presentation of Newton doesn’t hold any truck with non-Newtonian physics, I was out of luck. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…