Friday, March 14, 2025
It's Pi Day, which as far as I'm concerned is a decent excuse to have pizza (or pie) and make fairly obscure jokes on social media. But we won't be dwelling on it here, even though it would be an easy way to pad out the newsletter.
Another thing that I could have used in the newsletter is this collaboration between the legendary artists Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, a graphic story (is that the short form version of a graphic novel?) about the Gaza Strip and how a lot of Jews, this one included, are disgusted by abhorrent actions being taken in our name. Unfortunately it's as relevant now as it was when it was published back in February, and as it would have been pretty much any time in my lifetime. I'm trying to keep my political outrage to a low simmer right now, though, so let's move on to a more anodyne topic.
Item 1: a link
I've had this link saved to share for weeks, and every time I see someone else linking to it I get annoyed that I am going to look like a johnny-come-lately when I finally get around to including it in the newsletter. But the nature of linear time is such that this problem will only get worse, so I might as well get it out of the way now.
Marcin Wichary – who wrote an incredible book about the history of keyboards that I still don't know how I managed to avoid buying, setting on my shelf, and never opening – put together this labor of love about "the hardest working font in Manhattan". It's extremely worth clicking through and reading it (and looking at the beautiful photography), but the short version is that Wichary started noticing the omnipresence of a typeface used in myriad ways, all throughout Manhattan and beyond, and did a ton of detective work to trace it back to its origin. The result is a lovely blog post that will have you asking yourself, "why did he wait so long to put it in his newsletter?"
Take half an hour with the biggest screen you can look at a website on and learn something for once.
Item 2: a list
Top 10 Mathematical Constants:
- DeVicci’s Tesseract Constant
- Archimedes’s Constant (π)
- The Golden Ratio (φ)
- Salem Constant
- The Square Root of 5
- Apéry’s Constant
- Erdős–Tenenbaum–Ford Constant
- Ramanujan’s Constant
- Second Hermite Constant
- Euler’s Number (e)
Item 3: a media recommendation
Johnny Cash - "(There'll be) Peace in the Valley (For Me)"
Item 4: word of the week
Anaphora
In my writing I employ consonance. I employ assonance. I employ alliteration. I employ epistrophe. And yes, I employ anaphora. And if you don't like you, you can employ that unsubscribe link right over there!
Item 5: a photograph
See ya!
That's another fine Wolmania in the books. See you again next week for another one, in all likelihood.
Member discussion