Sunday, April 02, 2006
“I'm fooling you and you don't like it!”
Biggest reaction yet to an April Fool's Layout—Spring liked it, Bunny (who does not have a website as far as I know, but she sent email, and yes, that's her real name) didn't care for it, and Mike had problems viewing it correctly, which I suspected as much, given the rigidity of the layout (any window less than 900 pixels across and the layout would be screwed up).
This years theme was drawing paper and the graphics were ones I stole from another blog (and I lost the link—sorry). I liked the look, but it proved to be less flexible for layouts than I wanted. It was an interesting experiment in CSS, and if you are using Mozilla or Firefox you can view this year's April Fool's layout (or the past ones I've done) by going to the menu and selecting “View → Page Style”.
Now, about Arlo Lipof's gold …
Yesterday I posted about cutting a square of gold in such a way that when reassembled, it appeared that you get more gold than you started with, and that it's related to the Banach-Tarski Paradox (which is a real mathematical theorm by the way).
I'm sorry to say that the cuts suggested won't generate any more gold (least everybody would be doing it and the price of gold wouldn't be anywhere near $585 an ounce (up $5 since yesterday I see). The Banach-Tarski Paradox works on mathematical cows, not real world matter. Had one actually cut gold as specified, you would still end up with 64 cubic inches of gold, with a slender 1 cubic inch gap in the middle. I remember as a kid spending a few hours proving that to myself (lots of algebra, slops, Y-intercepts, area of triangles, that type of stuff, all on a sheet of graph paper) because, you know, I wanted to make sure before asking the 'rents for $50,000.
Boy, talk about disappointing.
