Gotta find a way to learn infinity

Allow me to offer another oddity from the world of work: I'm not really a crossword puzzle kind of person, since there are so many other things to do, but one of the lunch room people at work does and we other folks are regularly called on for the clues she misses. So I'm building some general crossword-solving skills, not all of them based on knowing that a five-letter river in France starting with ``L'' is ``Loire'', which keeps coming up; and last weekend I was even able to provide answers for several clues from The New York Times crossword, only one of them mathematics-based.

She's relatively weak on older pop culture figures, so that the other lunch room guy (with the same first name, oddly) and I get called on a lot for those. One which came up: four letters, ``Drummer ____ Krupa''. Both of us in the brain trust answered ``Gene'' almost immediately, and she thanked us and muttered something about the weirdness of the name and that she had no idea what band he was in. I said that he was the leader of the Gene Krupa Band, which got the biggest laugh I've gotten in the lunch room in months with anything I intended to be funny.

Trivia: The Morocco Conference, gathering delegates from Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Great Britain, Italy, Morocco, Holland, Portugal, Russia, and Sweden in early 1906, met in Algeçiras, where the principal hotel was owned by the Spanish delegate. Source: The Struggle For Mastery In Europe, 1848 - 1918, A J P Taylor.

Currently Reading: Writing To Learn, William Zinsser. The book is more or less about the properties of writing popular treatments of academic subjects, which makes me realize how much I never really see books that talk about how to popularize science or mathematics; you'd think there'd be a niche for that. (I can't even remember an Asimov essay where he described how he collected information to rewrite as an essay.) That said, Zinsser (writing in the late 80s) seems to have the horribly confused idea that Surely You're Joking, Mister Feynman was a science popularization in any but the most indirect way and projects it to have a relatively short life as such, due largely to its relentlessly chummy tone.