Budget Travel magazine has some thoughts on where to grab really cheap meals in San Francisco. I can personally report on a few of their picks: Nirvana, Home, and Eos are fantastic, while Red's Java House is not everything it's cracked up to be. At the very end of the article, they tease me by mentioning a riceless carne asada burrito available in the Mission, which is definitely going to merit further investigation. And soon.

From a piece by Freeman Dyson in the latest New York Review of Books comes this:

Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely before stating his law about them. He defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but occurs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word "miracle."

Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.

MC bought himself a that has some pretty interesting instructions.