Author Archives: Anton

four million colors

You may know from The Art of Computer Programming §4.1 (citing W. Penney, 1965) that, just as any positive real number can be represented by a bit string in base 2, any complex number can be represented by a bit … Continue reading

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

still dangerous

I took Dad to the target range today. I hadn’t shot in three years, nor he in seven. He, using my .22, was pleased enough with his shooting to take his target home. With my .40, I did better than … Continue reading

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

Foundation and Spam

Got a spam today from someone who evidently used Asimov to feed the gibberish-generator: Well, are implicated. When I’m most difficult to the regent, the nervous high priest in this tendency reached was up are Now? Hardin jump; remained silent … Continue reading

Posted in prose, spam | 2 Comments

do me no favors

Argh. In the newest version of Firefox, Gmail puts its content in popups, and I can’t find a way to turn off that behavior. Later: It only did that once, the first time I loaded Gmail after updating Firefox.

Posted in neep-neep | 1 Comment

a pretty thing

I eventually got around to ordering my poster from Zazzle. I feared that the colors might be dull, or that JPEG compression would spoil the detail, but it’s even more crisp and gorgeous than I imagined.

Posted in merch | Leave a comment

fun with eigenvectors

After installing that matrix math library, I spent a week’s evenings pushing several abstract graphs through my “topological coordinates” program and finding, to my lack of complete shock, that none of them had any neat three-dimensional embedding. Then I tried … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics | 1 Comment

what, if anything, were you thinking?

I hear some surprising things in this job. I trust I’m not violating confidence if I repeat this doozy from a discharge report: At this point the etiology of the [symptom] is still unclear to me; it could possibly be … Continue reading

Posted in medicine | 1 Comment