Linking back and forth

I just checked my discussion group and noticed that the home page got 700 hits in 18 hours. (Normally, there are about 100 or 150 a day.) Huh? Oh, it’s because Dave linked to me. Welcome, Scripting News readers!

Update: Thanks for the compliment, Dave. And yes, he is right: The photo of me (in the upper left corner) “was done by someone who knows how to use a camera”. Now the question is, do I reveal who took the picture, or should we just leave that as a little secret?

Escher and Lego

I linked to Andrew Lipson and his Lego sculptures several times before, but I hadn’t seen his and Daniel Shiu’s latest projects: Waterfall and Relativity. I’ve been wanting to build a model of Relativity for years now, and I actually started building a Lego model around Christmas last year, but didn’t have enough time to finish it. The “ruin” still sits in my parents’ basement, along with the rest of my old Lego bricks, waiting to be finished…

Link via Schockwellenreiter.

School

New York Times (free registration required): Lunch at 9:21, and Students Are the Sardines, by Elissa Gootman.

I can hardly believe this. For one thing, schools with up to 5,000 students don’t exist in Germany. The schools I know of have between 700 and 1,500 students, and the latter seems quite big to me. These schools are for students in grades five through ten or five through thirteen, so there also are fewer students per year. I would think that cramming 4,900 students into a building intended for 3,600 poses a serious risk in case the buildings need to be evacuated. If students are late for lessons because they’re stuck in hallways, what’s going to happen if there’s a fire? I thought we had it bad with up to 34 students per class, but at least we’ve got enough classrooms and don’t have to have different shifts of students coming and going at different times.

Link via Rabi.