Category Archives: Books and Reading

Classics

From my archives, I give you 221 Baker Street, an archive of all 60 Sherlock Holmes stories online, and Andreas Fehrmann’s Collection Jules Verne mit “umfangreiche Fakten und Ausarbeitungen zum großen französischen Schriftsteller Jules Verne und dessen Werk. Dabei sollen neben seinen Büchern und Theaterstücken auch deren Verfilmungen und die Freude an Abenteuer, Reiselust und der Welt der Technik nicht zu kurz kommen”.

Miep Gies overleden

Yesterday Miep Gies died. She would have turned 101 years old next month. Gies was the last surviving member of the group that helped Anne Frank, her family and the other four onderduikers.

I visited the Anne Frank huis in Amsterdam on May 17, 2000. The concentration camp in which Anne and Margot Frank died in March 1945, is quite close to André’s parents place; we visited Bergen-Belsen in December 2007 and passed it on our bike trip last summer. Today, none of the original buildings of the concentration camps remain, but the train station is still there, and a white line along the side of the road marks where the prisoners were forced to to walk from the train to the concentration camp.

H2G2

There’s interesting posting on MetaFilter about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Do you realize that robot can hum like Pink Floyd?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was (originally) a radio series, broadcast on BBC Radio during March and April 1978. It was a success. […] However, subsequent releases of the original radio series were edited (in part for copyright reasons), and the original broadcasts have been unavailable, until now. A software engineer and H2G2 fan has now tracked down the recordings of the original broadcasts, analyzed the differences between them and the official CD releases, and provided patches and instructions to update the CD release to match the original broadcast. Not only that, but he has written software to automate the process.

My Erdős number is infinity

Today’s xkcd comic made me laugh out loud!

Non-mathematicians who don’t know ErdÅ‘s or what an ErdÅ‘s number is should take a look at these Wikipedia articles: Paul ErdÅ‘s, ErdÅ‘s Number.

If you’d like to read more about ErdÅ‘s I recommend two books on him that I’ve read and enjoyed:

ErdÅ‘s also inspired a book on elegant mathematical proofs called Proofs from the Book, which is worth checking out too if you’re into that sort of books. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read this one cover to cover yet.)