Author Archives: Anton

negative curves

For years I’ve wished to learn enough hyperbolic geometry to write a simple ray-tracer. Recently a post on comp.graphics.algorithms advised me to look up Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry by Patrick J. Ryan; I was pleased to find that its subtitle … Continue reading

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I ain’t got no software

… that I can depend on. I updated my MacOS to 10.5 “Leopard”, and now the shell command sort no longer recognizes the ‘+’ option (to skip a specified number of words before beginning the key). Argh.

Posted in neep-neep | 2 Comments

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

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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

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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

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