Category Archives: sciences

go Hillsdale!

The first letter in this week’s Economist is from Nikolai Wenzel, assistant professor of economics at Hillsdale College, who says in part: . . . as of 2004 only 55% of America’s health spending was private . . . . this 45% does not capture … Continue reading

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Takana

I had the idea to design a fantasy script from combinations of a small repertoire of features: namely, subsets of this set of twelve segments. Using a fixed number of segments gives some built-in error-detection. There are 924 subsets of … Continue reading

Posted in language, mathematics | 9 Comments

four million colors

You may know from The Art of Computer Programming §4.1 (citing W. Penney, 1965) that, just as any positive real number can be represented by a bit string in base 2, any complex number can be represented by a bit … Continue reading

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

fun with eigenvectors

After installing that matrix math library, I spent a week’s evenings pushing several abstract graphs through my “topological coordinates” program and finding, to my lack of complete shock, that none of them had any neat three-dimensional embedding. Then I tried … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics | 1 Comment

what, if anything, were you thinking?

I hear some surprising things in this job. I trust I’m not violating confidence if I repeat this doozy from a discharge report: At this point the etiology of the [symptom] is still unclear to me; it could possibly be … Continue reading

Posted in medicine | 1 Comment

Finagle’s Law

I hoped to have some new math pictures for you (or at least for me) today, but my attempts to install a code library that I need have come to nothing. The makefile invokes gcc with options that version 3.3 … Continue reading

Posted in bitterness, mathematics, neep-neep | 6 Comments

les maths sont universels

Philippe “Goulu” cites my sphere arrangements page and discusses the subject thereof, in French.

Posted in blogdom, mathematics | Leave a comment