Category Archives: sciences

I’m melting!

Without serious effort, I seem to have lost a tenth of my peak mass in three years. I think the main change is that I no longer eat rice most days.

Posted in me!me!me!, medicine | 2 Comments

a perverse incentive in customer service

Awhile ago I worked out that, if you want to watch a different disc every evening using Netflix, your quota (the number of discs you have out at a time) needs to be at least five: three for the mail … Continue reading

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where’s my fix?

For two or three years I was never without a supply of navel oranges, because the Australian (or before that Chilean) crop came in just as the California crop was ending; but the antipodean goodies have not (yet) shown up … Continue reading

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polytopes

Dr. Richard Klitzing lost his webhost, so I took custody of his polytope pages.

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unexpected aspects of asymmetry

My left arm is very sore today, making me notice how many little things I habitually do with my ‘wrong’ hand. I wonder whether this says something about my brain. They say women’s hemispheres are less specialized; maybe my partial … Continue reading

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what could be simpler?

I got yet another wacky idea for a Martian calendar. Start with 24 months of 28 days each. Drop one day from every seventh month (so that a given month is short in one year out of seven), and add … Continue reading

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circles in ellipses

Many people have worked on the problem of packing equal circles efficiently in various regular shapes. David Cantrell asks, what is the ellipse of least area that can enclose n unit circles? Sometimes it’s a circle (n=1,7,19), sometimes it’s highly … Continue reading

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