stop helping me

Posted on Thursday, 2026 April 30 by Anton

For many years now I have maintained a long list of bookmarks to comic strips and other serials. Because I like to read earliest first, rather than follow any one title through its whole archive, I named the bookmarks with dates in the format 26430: two bytes for a year, one for a month (a b c for October November December), and two for a day.

(I know what you’re thinking. For dates before Y2K, I replace the leftmost digit with some character that sorts appropriately.)

The latest version of Firefox interprets leading digits as numbers rather than as characters, so that 25c31 precedes 00101. Dammit. I’ll have to rename them all.

Posted in neep-neep | 1 Comment

increasing harmony

Posted on Thursday, 2026 April 30 by Anton

In 1987 I conceived a theoretical improvement on the quarter-comma meantone scale: the generators are 2−5/4 31/4 57/16 (a ‘tone’, 194.501 cents) and 27/2 3−1/2 5−9/8 (a ‘semitone’, 114.420 cents). I previously showed a guitar concept fretted accordingly; see that post for my motives.

Next, can I extend the concept to higher primes? One difficulty is that, while the lower primes have well-defined notation (2 is five tones and two semitones, 3 is eight tones and three semitones, 5 is twelve tones and four semitones), it is not so clear where to put higher primes: should a factor of 7 be approximated by 12 tones and 9 semitones, or 15 tones and 4 semitones, or some other combination? This choice, which must be done again for every prime to be added to the scheme, affects the optimization.

So I attacked a simpler problem: local optima – minimax temperaments – with a single generator.
The world mostly yawned.

Posted in mathematics, music+verse | Leave a comment

Novial

Posted on Thursday, 2026 April 02 by Anton

I recently reread Otto Jespersen’s An International Language (1928) which presents Novial, a new international auxiliary language. (Jespersen had previously taken part in the development of Ido from Esperanto.) I did not love it quite as much as I did circa 1979, mainly because it over-emphasizes naturalism; so it was surprising to read that Tolkien, who admired Esperanto, called Novial a “factory product … made of spare parts”.

Posted in language | Leave a comment

tours

Posted on Sunday, 2026 February 08 by Anton

How many Euler circuits are there in the complete directed graph on N vertices? More interesting to me, how many equivalence classes under reversal and relabeling? Continue reading →

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

new cat

Posted on Tuesday, 2026 January 06 by Anton

Most of the bot comments here are on a few posts, for which I have now created a category spambait.

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in the dormitoire

Posted on Sunday, 2025 December 07 by Anton

I bought a cat-cave, and Bramble clearly approves, though he still prefers to get under my blankets. If he had his way I’d never get out of bed.

Posted in pets | 1 Comment

stop mnemonic porosity

Posted on Wednesday, 2025 April 30 by Anton

Watching The Long Kiss Goodnight and enjoying it as much as I did in 1996.

I find that I have regularly misquoted a favorite bit of dialogue. My memory for wording is usually better than that. Perhaps I inherited a mild case of Mom’s lifelong malapropism; but that would not explain another anomaly: I also misremembered that Patrick Malahide made an atrocious attempt at a Dixie accent, rather than using his own voice. Perhaps that was another role.

Posted in cinema | Leave a comment