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Slides I took with my Rolleicord 6x6 camera looked overexposed to me; but then, slide film is overexposed very easily, I have rarely used slide film at all (and with this camera, only once before), the film had been in the camera for a year and a half (but the last few frames I shot just before processing looked rather similar to the much older ones), the film may well have suffered from the summer heat ... Also, it would be surprising if the shutter of my camera was still as fast as when the camera was new, some 55 years ago.

I'm still playing around with circles and triangles. CaRMetal is wonderful for this - much better, obviously, than the general-purpose GIMP.

Having panettone, the inebriate (and, potentially, inebriating) variant. Good stuff!

European leaders pick two people from a pool of European leaders to be the leaders of Europe. The people aren't asked for their opinion; in fact, most European Union citizens haven't ever heard of the two people who are now their leaders. This procedure is based on a treaty (described by its supporters as a "constitution") which the vast majority of EU citizens have never had a chance of voting on.

There was something about lids shaped so they can't fall into the manhole they cover (provided there's a lip under the cover which makes the hole just slightly smaller, the point being that it's unnecessary to specify how much smaller) ... Obviously a circular lid will do fine; how about other shapes?

I've had a lot of fun reading Simon Singh's The Code Book these last few days.
The Handbook of Applied Cryptography, by Menezes, van Oorschot and Vanstone, is available online on the University of Waterloo website.
Isn't it fascinating that there are keys which can lock but not unlock something, and keys which can unlock but not lock?

ABC, BCD, DEF, DFH are right-angled triangles, each congruent to each other (the same side lenghts, the same angles). AC, BD, DH, EF as well as AB, CD, DE, FH are the legs of these triangles, CB, DF their hypotenuses.

The area of the (green) square BDHG = AC² = BD² = DH² = EF². The area of the (blue) square CDEL = AB² = CD² = DE² = FH².

Some of my young idealistic friends like to talk about figuring out what they could do to most help the world, and might go to Burma to see how the really poor live.  I tell them one has to learn lots of details about a place to figure out how to improve it, and they’d do better to try this on a part of the world they understand better.  But that doesn’t sound nearly as fun as saving the whole world all at once.
That's Robin Hanson in a blog post titled "Beware Far Ethics".

We've been back in Hong Kong for several weeks. On our return it was already less hot than when we left, but now most days are pleasantly cool and dry - compared to the inferno of summer, of course. It's nice not be dripping with sweat the moment you get out of the shower. Air pollution, on the other hand, is really bad these days, so much so that it's in the news day by day. And there are rumours that the government is thinking about discussing measures which might be taken at some undefined point in the future to do something about pollution.

"More safeguards" have been proposed by a government think tank for the "importation" of domestic helpers from mainland China into Hong Kong, according to the South China Morning Post (front page, 28 Sep 2009). Neither the government think tank nor the newspaper appear to find anything remarkable about the term "safeguard" here, which implies that (mainland) Chinese domestic helpers are a danger to (Hong Kong) Chinese people.