UNUSUAL HOBBIES.

The Marquess of Volesbury-Lowbottom collects right-footed argyle socks, but only if they are made of more than 58 per cent polyester.

By covering the soil in his planters with fine mesh, turning the pots upside-down and hanging them from wires attached to the drainage holes, and installing a strong daylight-spectrum lamp on the floor below the plants, Mr. Robin Makeweather has created an Australian tropical forest in his basement.

Ms. Anna Maria Czerniewniec keeps an album of unsolicited commercial mail documenting more than 285 ways of misspelling her name.

Mr. Emsworth Barker Praed has built every proposition in Euclid’s Elements out of ramen noodles. He has now begun work on Lobachevsky.

The poet Evelina Grock, an avid collector of rejection letters, was saddened and disappointed when a perfectly awful poem she had submitted to the New Yorker was accepted for publication. She was able to obtain her rejection letter after all, however, by sending a revised version of the poem with one hundred thirty-eight added lines in praise of Adolf Hitler.

Comments

  1. Daniel says:

    “Mr. Emsworth Barker Praed has built every proposition in Euclid’s Elements out of ramen noodles. He has now begun work on Lobachevsky.”
    The hard part about Lobachevsky is building the horosphere. After that it’s just Euclid writ large. Trouble is… even in 1/128 scale the sphere is still of infinite diameter.

    • Belfry Bat says:

      Ah! But the ambient Second Fundamental Form is Nontrivial! (I thought the greatest difficulty was getting around Hilbert’s Theorem)

      • Daniel says:

        Um, that’s algebra. Weren’t we doing geometry? (Am I the only one that did the reading?) On another note, apparently Lobachevsky and wife raised 7 children to adulthood (out of 18 pregnancies?!) — so it looks like old Nikolai wasn’t only doing geometry either.

        • Belfry Bat says:

          I suppose it’s unfair calling any one result “Hilbert’s Theorem”, when in algebra alone they go past 90… ; wikipedia calls the relevant result “Hilbert’s Theorem (differential geometry)” which … I don’t know how much it has to do with the Einstein-Hilbert Action or the Einstein-Hilbert Operatic Action either — they didn’t know yet about operads.

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