Category Archives: sciences

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

umbra Saturni

the view from Saturn’s shadow My latest finding of “dictionary translation”, at a pet store: ONE-STORY CAT CAVE UNE CAVERNE À CHATS D’HISTOIRE I’d make it caverne à chats à une étage. Funny that I missed this three years ago … Continue reading

Posted in astronomy, drugwar, eye-candy, language | 1 Comment

it takes an expert?

Kaiser Permanente has a radio spot with this bit of dialogue: So what did your doctor say? Oh, she prescribed the same medication she always does. And it worked? M-hm! My doctor is awesome. What’s wrong with this picture?

Posted in medicine, politics | 1 Comment