Today I watched Inside Man, my first Spike Lee joint since She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and, even more surprisingly, my first Denzel Washington ever. It’s swell. My housemate said after the opening shot, “Clive Owen is so great I’ll even watch him doing an American accent.”

I also watched an hour of Vermilion Pleasure Night, a Japanese cult tv show. Um. Imagine the most annoying of SNL’s recurring bits all strung together . . . .

I mis-heard some trivial question as “What is Hamming music?”

For some of us, the name Hamming is strongly associated with information theory, and so I imagined that “Hamming music” must be algorithmic composition using error-correcting principles.

And that got me thinking vaguely about redundancy in art.

Does anyone remember a song of thirty years ago that ended with the narration “But now we must descend, for there is another side to this vision”?

Later: I am advised that it’s “Solar Boat” by Ray Manzarek.

Woo hoo, the first season of The Wild Wild West is out on disc.

To the question “Who is your favorite James Bond?”, I always say Robert Conrad.

Andy Weir, weary of writing Casey and Andy, announced that strip #666 would be the finale. Meanwhile he has launched a new series about Alice Liddell, Wendy Darling and Dorothy Gale.

Netflix (or should I say N3tfl1×) got the first season of Numb3rs this week, and I watched the first four episodes with mixed reactions. On one hand, any popular presentation of mathematics in the real world is a treat. But would it be so hard to cut some of the tritest Television Drama Moments in favor of a fuller explanation of the math and some acknowledgement of its limits?

The pilot episode is the best of these. Charlie the mathematician sees a map of attacks by a serial rapist and says, I cannot predict where the next attack will be but I can tell you where he lives. He takes a crash course in criminal psychology from his brother Don the detective, generates a model of the rapist’s behavior, and announces with 96% confidence that the rapist lives in the yellow zone on his map. (Later he insists that 96% is equivalent to certainty.) The map is the output of a single “equation”. In his place I would try several different models and see where their conclusions overlap, but there’s no sign that Charlie even tries varying the weights in his model.

Episode 4 “Structural Corruption” is nonsense. Charlie takes some measurements of a skyscraper’s movement in wind, and announces that the structure is flawed (without saying why he thinks so) but he doesn’t know how. He whips up a software model of the building — it would have to be a very simple model — and extrapolates what would happen in a major earthquake; and from this extrapolation, if I understand right, he infers that the flaw is in the foundation. Huh?

For once I’m caught up on all my favorite webtoons. Here are links to their archives.

Sabrina; Soap on a Rope; Goats; Fluble; Ozy and Millie; Freefall; PVP; Bobbins; GPF; College Roomies from Hell!!!; You Damn Kid; When I Grow Up; Absurd Notions; Alice!; Snail Dust; Sinfest; JoBeth; Schlock Mercenary; Tonja Steele; Chopping Block; MegaTokyo; Shaw Island; The New Adventures of Bobbin!; The Gods of Arr-Kelaan; Casey and Andy; Planet Earth (and other tourist traps); Loserz; Tales of the Questor; Something Positive; Slow Wave; Wigu; Cyberbooty; Nothing Nice to Say; Sam and Fuzzy; Scandal Sheet!; Scary Go Round; The Dementia of Magic; Catharsis; Irregular Webcomic!; Bull and Bunny; Better Days; Why The Long Face; Antihero for Hire; Questionable Content; Hellbound; Girl Genius; Everyone Drunk But Me; Gunnerkrigg Court; Jesus and Mo; Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life.