I have experimented with integrals of

exp(i·f(t))

where ”f(t)” is a polynomial. I express these integrals as Taylor series, which are not hard to generate. Now I’d like to try

f(t) = a·t + Σb_k·sin(k·t)

and I have a horrid feeling that the Taylor series will be a nightmare!

Some simplified meantone guitars (here showing only the first octave):

pentatonic (GDAEB); seven naturals; three flats and two sharps; six flats and six sharps.

Here is the neck of a guitar that I’d like to have made someday, if I should ever develop the dexterity to make it worthwhile. The blue stripes show where standard frets would be, for comparison.

The tuning is my tweaked version of meantone: compared to just intonation, each factor of 2 is sharp by 1/16 comma, each factor of 3 is flat by 1/8 comma, and each factor of 5 is sharp by 1/4 comma. (A comma is the difference between 64:81, the Pythagorean major third derived from compounding fifths, and the more harmonious 4:5.) This makes the thirds and sixths much truer than in equal temperament, and the fifths slightly truer than in traditional meantone, which puts all the error in the 3s.

This design has 31 frets in the first octave: 12 flats, 7 naturals, 12 sharps. The bent frets span the difference (~151:152) between 18 of my sharp octaves and 31 of my flat fifths.

To reduce crowding, the second octave has only three flats and three sharps. The bent frets span the difference (~50:51) between G♯ and A♭.

The charts below should look familiar to players, if you squint a little.

The dots are placed according to a slightly different scale, which divides a factor of 12 into 111 equal steps; this is a local optimum among cyclic scales by the same criterion I used to choose the non-cyclic intervals for the frets.

I just thought of a new kind of packing problem, a mutant extension of the Thomson problem. In this version, each particle has coordinates in two independent spaces; in each it is confined to a sphere (of some dimension). In each space, pairs of particles repel each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance in the other space.

(I was imagining a head with striped hairs, as one does, and considered making each hair’s phase anti-correlated with those of its neighbors, and what that would mean.)

On most numbered dice, opposite sides are complementary; on a cube, for example, they add to 7. As a result, if you have the skill to throw a die so that the {1,2,3} corner lands on the table, the upward face must be at least 4.

I would prefer to design dice so that, if numbers are considered as masses, the center of mass coincides with the geometric center. I think this is equivalent to saying: the sum of the numbers in any hemisphere must be equal.

You can’t do that with a tetrahedron, cube, D10 or regular dodecahedron; but I found three solutions for the octahedron, and 876 for the rhombic dodecahedron. (At least I see no obvious way to reduce that number further with symmetries.)

For a cube the best you can do is put pairs of adjacent numbers on opposite faces.
The twelve best arrangements on the regular dodecahedron all have 0 and 11 opposite each other, 1–5 around 11, and 6–10 around 0.
The two best arrangements for D10 are 0285364179 and 0582367149 (reading around the fivefold axis, alternating upper and lower faces).
(Add 1 to each number if you don’t like zero-based indexing; it doesn’t affect the math.)

I’ll update here if I come up with an approach to the icosahedron problem that won’t take thousands of years.

I watched Behind the Curve (2018), a documentary about the Flat Earth movement. In the beginning, Mark Sargent says (I paraphrase), “I know the Earth is not round because I can see Seattle from here [Whidbey Island].”

If I knew the distance from the Space Needle to Sargent’s house, the altitude of that house and the altitude of the lowest part of the Space Needle visible from there, I could put an upper bound on the curvature.

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 I fitted each such function not to the piecewise constant directly but to the fit of the next lower degree.
( . . more . . )