Author Archives: Anton

late antiquity

An argument is offered that New Zealand is the wrong place to film Tolkien’s works: One of Tolkien’s great accomplishments was making Middle-earth seem vividly old. Wherever the reader looks, ruins and crumbling statues poke through the lichen. […] To … Continue reading

Posted in cinema, prose | 2 Comments

do you speak my calendar?

In MacBSD, the command cal 9 1752 shows the shortening of that month in the British Empire. If I reinstall MacOS and choose Italian as its default language, will the shift show up instead in October 1582?

Posted in calendars, history, neep-neep | Leave a comment

off by one

A look at 404s in my HTTP log revealed a bug in my math pix page, which in two places chooses randomly from families of images. I didn’t know that the PHP function rand(nmin,nmax) is inclusive at both ends.

Posted in me!me!me!, neep-neep | Leave a comment

as many as it takes

allRGB: images in which each of 16 million colors occurs exactly once. (Found at MathPuzzle.) I see I’m not the only one to think of the Hilbert curve idea, but I’ll post two others. In unrelated news, I was surprised … Continue reading

Posted in Cascadia, eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

Dear sir or madam: It’s important in today’s economy to cover all bases.

Funny spam comment: {The Secret|The Main Element {To|In order to|For you to|To help you|If you would like|If you want to totally|On the way to|When you need to}} master the moncler-market Is Rather Straight foward!

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limited voice recognition?

When I answer the ’phone, I generally say either “Yes?” or “Good day/evening, Sherwoods” rather than “Hello.” With cold-callers I often don’t get a response to that; I pause and try a variation or two of “Is someone there?” before … Continue reading

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a shifting role

The original Nikita (1990) and the American remake Point of No Return (1993) had a minor character called Victor the Cleaner — played by Jean Reno and Harvey Keitel respectively — whose specialty was making evidence, such as bodies, disappear. … Continue reading

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