Author Archives: Anton

circles in ellipses

Posted on Thursday, 2009 January 08 by Anton

Many people have worked on the problem of packing equal circles efficiently in various regular shapes. David Cantrell asks, what is the ellipse of least area that can enclose n unit circles? Sometimes it’s a circle (n=1,7,19), sometimes it’s highly … Continue reading →

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

time and capacity

Posted on Sunday, 2008 December 28 by Anton

Malcolm Gladwell writes in his new book: . . . excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – which surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is … Continue reading →

Posted in psychology | 2 Comments

battling ampersands

Posted on Sunday, 2008 December 28 by Anton

Abercrombie & Kent, a travel agency that uses a Times Roman ampersand as a trademark, sued andBEYOND, a travel agency, not for the tacky capitalization but for using a Gill Sans ampersand as a trademark. I doubt that such a … Continue reading →

Posted in arts, heraldry | 1 Comment

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut with a straight face

Posted on Sunday, 2008 December 28 by Anton

Someone considered this passage, in “The Night of the Legion of Death” (an episode of The Wild Wild West), worth quoting on IMDb: You’re not the Governor. Your one of the down faith, commandor present, your value silver voice! Your … Continue reading →

Posted in cinema, language | Leave a comment

back in time

Posted on Sunday, 2008 December 28 by Anton

I wrecked my blog in trying to cure a Unicode display problem, and restored the site from a backup of December 11. A few posts and comments were lost.

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

a modest condition

Posted on Wednesday, 2008 December 10 by Anton

When we are called upon to pay the debts of a corporation because it is “too big to fail”, shouldn’t the beneficiary at least be required to break up into pieces small enough to fail?

Posted in politics | Leave a comment

Hilbert’s palette

Posted on Wednesday, 2008 December 03 by Anton

A space-filling path through this square is matched to an analogous path through the color-cube. I had this idea in mind for years but the algorithm for Hilbert’s curve defeated me; then I stumbled on Steve Witham’s Python code, and … Continue reading →

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | 4 Comments