Author Archives: Anton

Scribbles: The Ensmoothening, Part III

Many of the curves in this chart have some unsightly wiggles. That’s because, when a function of degree 2 or higher tries to approximate a piecewise constant, it tends to go back and forth across the target. So here instead … Continue reading

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supply issues

I’ve had a number of mugs printed by Zazzle, and most of them came out gorgeous; but last summer I was peeved enough by a delivery cock-up to want to take my business elsewhere. Recently I got around to doing … Continue reading

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pull the other one

This week I’ve had a flood of mail with titles like VIDEO OF YOU! and YOU GOT RECORDED!. A tweetmate asked me to save and share one, so here it is.

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a sense of place?

I read Jack Vance’s memoir, of which many pages say “We went to Ireland / Tahiti / Kashmir . . . found a pleasant cottage and stayed there for a couple of months, cranking out stories.” It would be pleasant to know … Continue reading

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it’s in the literature

On a truncated icosahedron / buckyball / Telstar-style soccer ball, consider two adjacent hexagons and the two pentagons that are adjacent to both. These four faces can be removed, rotated by a right angle, and reattached, causing only a small … Continue reading

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I ain’t Zazzling any more

You probably haven’t noticed the absence of a link in the upper left, “buy 2D printed objects”, which went to my catalogue on Zazzle: shirts, mugs, posters.

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all the world’s a wiki

I toy with the thought of converting this here website to MediaWiki (which my host supports), as I am more efficient at editing there than at writing raw HTML in vi. The wiki’s first articles would be: Two-dimensional design Hyperbolic … Continue reading

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