Pictures, and Polish, from Poland

is the traditional reason to visit Krakow, though this is probably the best view you get of it; the interior is very dark and very tourist-ridden.



represents one of the other reasons to visit Krakow, namely that it's about the best place in Europe to learn about current cultural and drinking trends amongst middle-class university-age Australians.

I am not altogether sure what the userpic for this entry, observed on a sign in a Polish park, is intended to prohibit, but it's beautifully iconic of its kind. Looking at the arrangement of the text on the sign, it may mean "Niszczenia i uszkadzania urzadzen, budynkow i budowli parkowych"; my West Slavic is insufficient to decipher. I can make a pretty good guess at the parts of speech of each word in "Umieszczania bez zgody administratora tablic, napisow oraz ogloszen", I just have a little trouble with the vocabulary.

There's something about renting in Cambridge that makes one sigh at seeing things like http://www.viviun.com/AD-48729/ in Polish estate-agent windows; on the other hand, I really don't have the background required to make owning a gite in Silesia a viable life choice.

Numbers of Unusual Size

2361633138713^4 + 2378932615558^4 + 4978964945231^4 = 18*2477071347133^4

Which is to say, since I've not suddenly got my hands on ten trillion times as much compute power as I had on Sunday, I've actually managed to find an embedded elliptic curve in one of my quartic surfaces. http://tom.womack.net/quartsurf has the details, more information about quartic surfaces, long lists of points, and other things to amuse the easily numerically amused.