the Talmud and the gopher protocol

Bad advice, running around loose.

In utterly unrelated news: This week I shared an office with someone who sounds to me as if she’s from some unfamiliar part of Australia but is in fact from Derby. Learn something every day.

My fullerene page was the first webpage I made, in 1998. The C programs whose output is shown there – to enumerate pentagon-hexagon topologies, and to estimate their 3D shapes – were lost years ago; I wanted to improve and extend them anyway.

I’ve worked on the new search program (in Python) at long intervals. Last weekend, a version with all the essential features ran, up to 24 faces. The bad news is that the file of partial solutions – on which the program would have built to proceed to 32 faces, and so on – was 5 gigabytes. I’ll need a more efficient way to handle partials, or else to abandon the concept.

I’m told that the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 commanded that sales of ammunition be reported to police, and that that provision was repealed circa 1986 at the request of police who were weary of handling data that had never been useful. But when does the state of California ever learn anything? (Cited by Claire Wolfe)

The Nixie Tube Wristwatch (cited by Charlie Stross)

I just had the most clever idea, thanks to watching part of Firefly for the nth time.

Now and then you may need to talk to someone on subspace video relay. Each of you is looking at the monitor, not the camera, so the illusion of eye contact – and thus some gestural nuance – is lost. (Or so I assume; I have not tried it.)

Solution: bracket the monitor (horizontally) with two cameras, and transmit the image in fine vertical stripes, corresponding to an array of prisms on the monitor. Each user gets a binocular view of the other, centered in the right place.

(Later: Dad tells me he almost got to see a Sharp notebook computer with such a display. He’s jazzed about the possibility of adapting Visual Python‘s stereo feature for it.)

Drawback: the cameras are farther apart than your eyes (unless the monitor is tiny), and so the image may seem to bulge grotesquely.

Alternative: process the two views into a single interpolated view; I believe the algorithm already exists, but have no idea how much processing power it needs.

One standard to change is that of using scan lines in TV. If the electron guns scanned the tube in a Hilbert curve, either the broadcaster or the receiver could double the potential resolution while remaining compatible with the old resolution at the other end.

Joseph Hertzlinger in rec.arts.sf.science