April 21 I had an honor to participate in the Project Homeless Connect, the fourth edition. Initially the project was started by the mayor of San Francisco and state employees, then volunteers joined, and last time we had about 800 volunteers. In the essence, the goal of the project is to "connect" San Francisco population of homeless residents with the services they may need, provided either by the government or by businesses and individuals. Every time PHC happens, the organizers get a better idea of what is needed; and this time, for example, we had wheelchair repair service, and according to the mail all PHC volunteers get, "12 people had their wheelchairs or electric chairs repaired on site". The main services were housing information, shelter placement, medical services, legal consulting, and eligibility for benefits checks.

Turned out that one events is a corollary from another. According to prof. Liberman:

No web forum sufficiently powerful to express interesting things can be established as coherent by arguments within its own format.

A new incompleteness theorem

The sign on the right was shown at the top of "Meaningless Drivel" during its best time.

1. News map:

Shows which stories (nationwide and sectionwide) got more press coverage.

via Keywords.

2. The Baby Name Voyager "which gives you a wonderful ethnohistoric picture of the United States through trends in baby names"

Via comments on the LanguageHat

3. AmazType

… you can see the word of your choice spelled out in letters made up of thumbnails of the publications whose titles contain it. (You can also ask to collect the works by authors rather than titles, or use thumbnails from the covers of music CDs or video/DVDs rather than books.)

Via Language Log

One day I happened to be in Union Square, where Zeny Cieslikowski had his exhibition. His pictures were striking and the sign said the pictures weren’t digitally transformed, which was hard to believe. There are only small pictures on his site, and I am afraid they don’t give an adequate impression about his works. But anyway, here are some:

A bridge in snow, Russia

The 5th Avenue, New York

Italy, Rome

I got "Poetry for Dummies" book in the local library, and fortunately I also got Brodsky’s book, so I could forget about "Poetry for Dummies". :) Here is a poem I liked and it isn’t rhymed, so I wasn’t too intimidated to attempt translaton.