Author Archives: Anton

a curious concentration

All of the Cyrillic spam I see has Moscow phone numbers (495). How come no one in the rest of the Slavic Orthodox world is getting in on the game? Next day: What d’ya know: I got one with (3435), … Continue reading

Posted in language, spam | Leave a comment

Court unpacking

One occasionally hears that the upcoming election is especially important because the incoming President may have to fill umpty-leven vacancies on the Supreme Court. To remove this jackpot effect, I had the idea of letting the President appoint one member … Continue reading

Posted in constitution | 2 Comments

LiveLand

Here’s a pretty thing: an animated fractal mountain generator (Java). The text unfortunately doesn’t explain anything about the algorithm, but it’s evidently the familiar triangle-subdivision mountain – with the offsets oscillating, so you see the land rising and tilting and … Continue reading

Posted in eye-candy | Leave a comment

Schindler’s subtitles

My hearing is just poor enough that I usually turn the subtitles on when I play a DVD; I could mostly do without the help, but it’s good to have when someone mumbles. It’s often clear that whoever made the … Continue reading

Posted in cinema, language | Leave a comment

in odd places

Sometimes the filler in spam is meaningful: Developed in the 19th century through the study of the Indo-European languages, the comparative method remains the standard by which mainstream linguists judge whether two languages are related, with alternative lexicostatistical methods widely … Continue reading

Posted in spam | 1 Comment

the view from in here

I suspect my new glasses have more chromatic aberration than the old. In my computer background pattern, a fractal with lots of intense colors, the red seems to stand out in front of the blue. In unrelated news, we had … Continue reading

Posted in California, food, me!me!me! | 2 Comments

non c’è più religione

Tsk. A current radio spot gives the web address “wachovia dot com backslash new”. Meanwhile, what’s new with me? I’m reading Coxeter’s Non-Euclidean Geometry in the hope that it will give me the stuff I’ve sought in vain in other … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics, me!me!me!, neep-neep, pets | 3 Comments