sequences

A cartoon, in which Churchy LaFemme tries to imagine a skyscraper with no 13th floor, leads me to the idea of labeling the floors with some other familiar sequence; for example, Genesis, Exodus … but it might be hard to get occupants for suites on Lamentations. In Japan, the ground floor could be named for the era in which it is built (currently Reiwa), the next for the preceding (Heisei) and so on; an extremely high tower would boast of reaching Taika.
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Taylor series of integral of exponential of Fourier series

I have experimented with integrals of

exp(i·f(t))

where ”f(t)” is a polynomial. I express these integrals as Taylor series, which are not hard to generate. Now I’d like to try

f(t) = a·t + Σbk·sin(k·t)

and I have a horrid feeling that the Taylor series will be a nightmare!

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42 … or 34?

My new keyboard came last week, a Piantor Pro from Beekeeb, a two-person shop in Hong Kong. Quality work.

But the keys are narrower than my fingers (on average), and the deep pinky stagger – offset of the pinky finger’s column of keys – is hard to get used to, after fifty years of conventional typing. To mitigate the problem I made the outer columns repeat their neighbors. I had planned to avoid using them anyway, as practice for maybe someday moving to a board like Ferris without those columns.

Too often after hitting a key on the upper row, I also hit its neighbor below. So I’m considering replacing the nearly flat keycaps with a more traditional style so that my fingers can more easily find the boundaries between them; and if that doesn’t help, replacing the very light switches with stiffer ones for the lower rows.

Anyway. I’ve been fiddling with different algorithms to find an arrangement of the 30 core keys – letters and selected punctuation – that minimizes a crude measure of inconvenience. Continue reading

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whither arrows

In anticipation of my next keyboard, I have been doodling layouts of the non-alpha layers, as one does. Today let’s discuss arrow keys. Continue reading

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first day with Glove80

Typing this in a non-qwerty layout on a new ergonomic keyboard. Learning the alphabet anew is of course a challenge, as is getting to know the keys themselves. My pinkies want to rest on the upper row, and the upper thumb keys are hard to reach; I think both these problems could be lessened if the palm rest were higher on the pinkie side.

When I started shopping for a new keyboard, I found quite a rabbit-hole of enthusiasts. The cool kids use home-built boards of only 34 or 36 keys.

Posted in keyboard, me!me!me! | 6 Comments

browsing in my Wikipedia history

I have been active on Wikipedia since 2005, mostly making incremental improvements – correcting punctuation here, tightening sloppy language there – with emphasis on heraldry and polytopes but wandering over a very wide range of subjects as whim takes me.

I have set the option to add to my watchlist whatever I modify. The result was a watchlist far too big for me to keep up. (Until recently there was no option to watch for a limited time.) A few months ago I began a campaign to trim that down from 18511, one by one; at the moment it’s 14876. In a year or two I should have it licked.

I have also been looking at my past participation on Talk pages, and am gratified at how often this happened: someone said “we should rename this article to …”; others pointed out disadvantages of the proposed new title; and I, coming in late, proposed yet another title, which was adopted. Among them: “Ambiguities in Chinese character simplification”, “Fossil fuels lobby”, “Growth hormone in sports”.

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a question of boundaries

If I were in charge of the partition of India, I’d do it bottom-up. Starting with the smallest practical districts, ask in each one: For each of your neighbors, would you amalgamate? Do the most favored mergers (skipping any that would create enclaves), and ask again.

(It appears that I had this idea first for Iraq after US occupation and later applied it to India.)

I imagine the result as perhaps a hundred unitary states in twenty confederations, each including both new republics and old monarchies.

A new thought. Suppose that, where mergers are least popular, we make the boundary permanent and not ask again. We might end up with some C-shaped states, partly divided by an internal boundary (imagine that France’s borders include the Loire). What would that mean?

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