An interesting read, by the way. I've been thinking a bit about splines and interpolation and such recently, but in a rather different context. For a long time I've had an ill-informed interest in 3D graphics, and I've spent a small part of the last few weeks trying to turn this into a better informed interest. I've installed blender and played around with it a bit. I'm not sure how much I've learnt yet (apart from the fact that the blender interface almost defines idiosyncracy).
I've also spent a while trying to write a new version of Python's rather dogs-breakfast-y Extending and Embedding manual. It's still very much a work in progress, but if anyone has any comments, I'm all ears.