Exquisite timing from my perspective. Sudden snow storm yesterday morning resulted in school closures and even College closure. The whole family was home (except Shanese had always had conference calls scheduled for most of the day -- with folks from Houston etc. so they weren't cancelled). The kids built their biggest snowperson ever and I managed to take the whole day off from my paralyzing anxieties about upcoming speaking engagements, new teaching and lack of writing. It felt great and the snow was beautiful.

But anyway, here's a couple of fun things that you all might be able to make some use of. My daughter knitted (knit?) me something amazing: a mobius scarf! She just made a fairly normal (though nicely coloured and very soft) scarf, but then gave it a half twist and somehow knit (knitted?) the ends together. How great is that!? Get someone to knit you one. (Out of curiousity, just now, I did a search on the web and found these directions for knitting one from the edge! Freaky.) Next, I want her to make me a Klein bottle jacket!

Then here's your pay-off for reading this: two lovely animations I found the other day while chasing down stuff on digital rights management. The first cartoon is by Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel. It's about the so-called 'Trusted Computing' initiative. (That's 'trusted' as in 'you're not.')

But the second is even better; a wonderful piece of art showing the randomness and despair of the powderpoint generation, called Le Grand Content by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit, inspired by the often-marvelous blog indexed by Jessica Hagy.