Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Deniable Plausibility
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2001 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
It's the ANSI Standard Deviation Cost of Living!
"ISO hate that joke."
Allow me to assume that you actually want to read about Touristka brainwane, living it up in Leningrad.
Today I went to the Necropolis and found a surprise: Euler's grave! Yes, Leonhard Euler (if I spelled it correctly) is buried in St. Petersburg. (Jon, our Resident Director, told me that Euler corresponded a great deal with Catherine the Great, and was invited to her palace.)
I also saw the graves of Rimsky-Korsakov, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and at least one other that I'm forgetting. I kind of minded that Mussorgsky and Borodin (and maybe Rimsky-Korsakov) got music engraved on their memorial stones, but Euler didn't get any equations on his.
AT THE GEORGIAN RESTAURANT: Hung out and ate lyubo (?) with Rasa, Ross (who reminds me, in look-and-feel, of Seth!), John, Katya, and Greg. Discovered: When I want to go incognito ergo sumana, perhaps I will call myself Natasha von Chinglestick; and, there are a lot of animals whose names start with the letter "p."
Also: I was trying to think of what a person would look like if she tried to combine the Gypsy look with the Goth look. I concluded that Goths are the new Gypsies.
LUG meeting: The St. Petersburg Linux User Group meets on the last Wednesday of every month. I think I'll try to go to this next one, if only to meet Russians.
There is more to say. For example, A little Russian is a dangerous thing, but I can't decide what the second line would/should be. And I might try to find Mendeleev's grave and lay a copy of the Periodic Table and some roses on it. And I've had some very odd dreams lately, and I still need to write more about that cafe thing that happened the other night. Oh, and now I've been in three memorials-to-the-dead in about ten days (Arlington National Cemetery, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Necropolis), and that was certainly thought-provoking, in a compare-and-contrast way.
Certainly I appreciate all your encouragement and comments, and don't really feel homesick. Well, I've been a tiny bit under the weather....but that's another story.
First published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/20/104246/311
