Miscellany.

Just a few short notes:

• My favorite thing about driving through Virginia would have to be the “SPEED LIMIT ENFORCED BY AIRCRAFT” signs. Surely aircraft alone are insufficient to enforce speed limits; presumably what happens is that observation aircraft relay information to patrol cars, and the patrol cars pull the car over and write the tickets. I can only think of two ways that the aircraft alone could enforce speed limits, both of which are awesome to think about whenever some wild driver blows past at twenty-five miles over the speed limit. The first is strafing, and the second is using some sort of giant magnet to physically remove the car from the roadway.
• I am about three-quarters of the way through Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It's a tough book to get through, and I probably don't have the background to get as much out of it as I could, but it's rewarding in an interesting way. I've been surprised to find that my way of thinking is really congenial to historicism of many stripes. Another way of saying this is that Rorty's way of thinking doesn't seem as weird or scary as I thought it would.
• Brahmagupta once said that anyone who could solve x²-92y²=1 in less than a year is a mathematician. The other day I wrote a program that can do this in milliseconds, but I used a method from Wolfram's MathWorld so I am not sure it counts.
• I picked up the new Spoon album and I really like it. Every song is interesting, and it all fits together in a really nice way. I haven't read any reviews aside from Peter Suderman's small endorsement on The American Scene. I have noticed that the Internet encourages people to quickly and reflexively compare their reactions to art or music with the internet median instead of taking time to meditate or struggle with the experience. While this is part of the process of enjoying a show like Lost, it's the wrong way to go about appreciating anything that may turn out to have deeper meaning.
• Dickens: “I don't know where she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature, in her womanly bonnet and apron, though a covered way at the bottom of the court; and melt into the city's strife and sound, like a dewdrop in the ocean.” Maybe it's a little sentimental, but there are lines in Bleak House that stay with me for days.
• I probably could have tightened some of this stuff up for Twitter, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I am not nearly clever enough to be tweeting.