Laminous chassepot

laminous (adj.): laminate, layered, composed of overlapping layers

chassepot (n.): officially known as Fusil modèle 1866, was a military breechloading rifle, famous as the arm of the French forces in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871.

Coincidentally, a lamina in math is simply a closed surface (2-manifold) with a density function that you can integrate over to find the mass - very layerlike.

So, I have not posted since I came back from Indiana. Mainly because there were a bunch of things that I had to catch up with. Some of these things I actually had to catch up with. Some of the things turned out to be playing a lot of Halo 3, Brawl, and even some WoW. And some of the things were completely pointless, like deciding to learn how to read ancient Greek - for some reason that seemed more enticing than posting, at the time. But anyway, I will remedy that now.

I might as well mention Indiana a bit. In short, it was very awesome, much better than expected. For example, they actually gave us good, edible food. Many would be surprised at what a rare occurence that actually is at events like these.

Of particular coolness is all the free merchandise we got there. Sure, we got a lot of standard stuff... t-shirts, mousepads, notebooks, etc. But, for example, they also gave us a Microsoft... gameboy imitation keychain?:

On this one-of-a-kind item you can play 6-by-6 Sudoku (and not the normal kind either - some puzzles that it gave actually had several solutions :P), a Space Invaders game in which you can survive 10 seconds, max, and a Simon Says game, where they give you random arrows, that you have to repeat.

Moreover, it's designed amazingly - since in order to stop playing a certain game, you need to either win at it or lose at it. In either Space Invaders or Simon Says, you're bound to lose very quickly, so this is fine. But you can't really lose in Sudoku... so you have to solve the Sudoku before you can play any other game mode. Resetting it does nothing at all =).

We had some fun with this when we got bored for a bit. Anyway, second up is a really cool... white plastic ball:

But the really cool thing about this white plastic ball is that it can turn inside out! As shown in this very badly recorded video below (try holding a camera phone with one hand and spinning the ball in the air with the other):

We also got some cool stuff, like a frisbee that folds into a wallet sized container and a cool blue ball that turns red when squished. Not to mention three water bottles from different sponsors, and a big yellow bag from Caterpillar. I probably brought back more than I took with me.

Anyway, I'll probably post more later. Until then, ciao.

-squidout