Back in the day, I had this modest collection of matchbooks from gay bars and discos.
At the Los Angeles Central Library in 2018, I saw a display of similar matchbooks from ONE Archives. I wrote and asked if they wanted mine. They did, and I donated these.
I also gave them these gay pins and buttons:
(See five photo links below.)
I'm another map freak. I have hundreds of maps. Printed maps. Even in this digital age when all maps are available online, I still like printed maps.
Many are from AAA and National Geographic. But some are from more obscure map-makers. And, from my father, some are older than I am. And, from my father's workplace as they were being discarded, a handful pre-date him!
The photo albums linked below show just a few of my maps. Each album begins with a description of the maps shown. Click on any image to see it larger.
Map Album 2: Topographic maps
Map Album 4: Trend maps
Map Album 5: Miscellaneous maps
I have a collection of Rubik's Cubes and similar objects, about 20 of them (See the photo album.)
When I first read about it, in a fourth-generation copy of an article in a German magazine, I couldn't see how it was possible — how a cube of smaller cubes could possibly rotate slices in all three dimensions.
At the time, they were only available in Europe, not in the U.S. My Occidental math faculty colleague Don Goldberg managed to get one from abroad, and I borrowed it for a day. In that time, I did learn how to fix one side, but that's all I could reliably do.
I went there on that day as soon as they opened, and I was one of the first set of three people who were given a chance. Of course, I won a $50 gift certificate. As the day went on, more and more Oxy students were showing up and winning. They quickly cut back to one group of three contestants every hour instead of every thirty minutes, and long before the day was done, they stopped the promotion altogether. Oxy students who never got a chance protested, and there was even some TV coverage of it all.
In his 1981 book, Notes on Rubik's Magic Cube, David Singmaster writes, "A Los Angeles department store offered $50 to anyone who could put one face right in three minutes. They lost $600 to a group of Don Goldberg's students at Occidental College."
For years afterwards, I bought and received as gifts many variations of the cube. I also participated in the Cube-Lovers email group (now long gone).
I have written before about my interest in Turing.
In 2018, the Bank of England decided they wanted a scientist on the new £50 note and invited nominations from the public. In six weeks, they received 227,299 nominations with 989 eligible names. With the help of public focus groups, their advisory committee determined a final shortlist of one dozen. The bank's governor, who makes the final selection, announced the choice of Turing in July 2019. The design was released in March 2021, and the bills were issued June 23rd.
Although the US Mint sells coins and bills direct to the public, the Bank of England does not. After declaring everywhere that I wanted one, a computer science teacher friend said she wanted one, too, and she asked another math teacher friend with family in England, and that connection worked.
Rodney Hoffman
P.O. Box 41768
Los Angeles, CA 90041
