An ad from 1933 extolled the virtues of zippers in pants trousers, among them precluding the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray, a phrase I'm guessing their ad agency took a while to settle on. This was 71 years before Justin T. uttered the term wardrobe malfunction.

I wore button fly jeans in the 1980s. Levi's was the more popular choice but I preferred the color of Lee. The model I liked was discontinued around 1985 and I stocked up. A worker at a clothes store saw me pulling the entire stack of a dozen pairs in my size off the shelf and this conversation ensued:

worker:	What are you doing with those?
Tommy:	I'm buying them.

Over the years I made use of all but two of the dozen pairs. By around the turn of the century, the size I wore in 1985 didn't fit anymore. I should sell the two unworn pairs on eBay. They might be somewhat of a collector's item. They date from a bygone era when a lot of jeans weren't pre‑washed and came from the factory stiff as cardboard. They were made in the USA.

"In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley repeatedly mentioned zippers, implying that, in their newness (as of the early 1930s), mechanical complexity, ease of use, and speed, zippers were somehow corrosive of natural human values"—so Wikipedia tells us.

When Consumer Reports rated jeans in 1991, they called button fly "an inconvenient design artifice."

When I was a kid I asked my dad why some people preferred button fly. He said, "They make less noise in the movies."

Before yesterday, I didn't know what a B‑21 was. I had no idea I was posting the first pic the general public would see of a B-21 flying in formation with a tanker.

There was some healthy skepticism on social media about whether my pic was real or AI. I'm on more solid ground now that several publications got confirmation from the Air Force that the flight had occurred.

My pic is featured in articles at:

• Interesting Engineering
• Defense Industry Europe
• Air & Space Forces
• Air Data News
• The War Zone
• The Aviationist
• Yahoo
• ...

It felt weird to post a photo of military planes while the country is waging a disastrous and ill‑considered war. But it didn't make sense to waste the photo. I'll photograph any unusual plane that comes over, military or civilian.

I run a program that gives me an audible alert when certain aircraft are in my area, e.g. tankers (because aerial refueling is photogenic).

I got an alert this morning and grabbed my camera. I got a few pics and posted them to X. I have a small following of aviation geeks on X from before when Musk took over Twitter. I've moved away from X in general but I occasionally still post airplane pics there.

I unknowingly created a stir today. A screenshot of one reaction is below.

When AI data centers get press nowadays, it's typically negative. They are large, unbeautiful buildings. They consume ginormous amounts of power. They make noise.

But an otherwise typical article about data centers last year also bemoaned that they're doing tons of matrix multiplication which the author deemed unbeautiful:

"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics," the mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote, in 1940. But matrix multiplication, to which our civilization is now devoting so many of its marginal resources, has all the elegance of a man hammering a nail into a board. It is possessed of neither beauty nor symmetry: in fact, in matrix multiplication, a times b is not the same as b times a.

For a lot of us, some of the most tasty forms of symmetry are those modeled by nonabelian groups (expressible by matrix multiplication). But to each his own.

And masterful use of a hammer can be elegant indeed.

An oblique sheep in a linear algebra textbook.