Author Archives: Anton

steam and circuitry

One of my favorite games is Ticket to Ride (despite its silly name), in which a strategic element is choosing tickets: pairs of cities to be joined. The value of a ticket is the length of the shortest path that … Continue reading

Posted in games | Leave a comment

cross-drafting

Gail Simone asks: Question of the day: if you could have one piece of art drawn by any living comics artist, not to sell, what artist and what character? I haven’t followed (paper) comics in a long time, but several … Continue reading

Posted in cartoons | Leave a comment

Neptune’s Gulch

In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt invented a radical new engine and (according to folklore) emigrated to Atlantis to keep his invention out of the hands of parasites. Charles Stross’s novel Neptune’s Brood is about uncovering the true history of the … Continue reading

Posted in prose | 3 Comments

I’ve seen such changes

How old do you need to be to understand this gag from 1978?

Posted in cartoons, technology | Leave a comment

referral spam

Each month I look through my HTTP log for new incoming links. Most of them are phony. In December, Russian porno was up and other commercial spam was down.

Posted in spam | Leave a comment

allonymy

A notice to renew my domain registration prompts thoughts of what I might have used instead: ansher, anwood, tonsher, tonwood ? tonsher reminds me of an acquaintance whose bald spot looks uncannily like a monk’s tonsure — and that’s even funnier … Continue reading

Posted in me!me!me! | Leave a comment

Scribbles: The Ensmoothening, Part II

One thing I noticed in that last series of charts is that more than one degree of discontinuity doesn’t help: the best-looking curves are mostly on the diagonal, where only the last nonzero derivative is discontinuous. Here, therefore, are those … Continue reading

Posted in curve-fitting | 2 Comments