Forking street in ancient Pompeii, originally uploaded by gisleh.

Check out the grooves worn into the roads in ancient Pompeii by the chariots.

Apparently they were also subject to detours from roadwork, one-way streets and traffic jams.

Darn New York Times and their thought provoking book reviews making me look up random stuff on the Internet.

As found from a commenter on Hacker News, the Banach-Tarski Paradox is described as thus:

The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set theoretic geometry which states that a solid ball in 3-dimensional space can be split into several non-overlapping pieces, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. The reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them, without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are complicated: they are not usual solids but infinite scatterings of points. In a paper published in 1924, Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski gave a construction of such a “paradoxical decomposition”, based on earlier paradoxical decompositions of a unit interval and of a sphere due to Giuseppe Vitali and Felix Hausdorff, and discussed a number of related questions concerning decompositions of subsets of Euclidean spaces in various dimensions.

Through Google Reader, to BoingBoing, to Modern Mechanix, I found the following Wikipedia article detailing the Palace of the Soviets, which I found fascinating. The 30s was a heady time for large scale architecture in Europe. Albert Speer rose through the Nazi ranks after being hired by Hitler to design his large scale projects (his book Inside the Third Reich is an amazing read).

The amazing thing is that construction did actually begin, and was only stopped due to the beginning of World War 2. Plans for its completion remained open until 1958, when it was converted into a swimming pool.