short takes

[cellio]

Congrats to all the folks behind SpaceShipOne! Commercial space flight for non-billionaires in my lifetime has just gotten more likely. Woot!

Here's a perfect gift for certain types of geeks: Klein Bottles. Be sure to read the guarantee.

This is a fantastic hack (link courtesy of dglenn). Some urban explorers in Paris found some unused tunnels and caves below the city, so they built a cinema -- with restaurant and bar. Their mission: to "reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art".

Random bit from the instructions for my new sukkah: What's the Hebrew word for the day you take the sukkah down? Chanukah. :-)

I use a strand of small white lights to light my sukkah. (Got 'em cheap one year on Boxing Day. :-) ) The box is long since gone, but I remember that it proclaimed that these were the sorts of lights where one burned-out bulb does not take out the entire strand. This is, now, demonstrably true, but I am at a loss to explain the failure mode that results in all lights in the first third of the strand -- and no others -- going out simultaneously.