Category Archives: sciences

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

Jenn

New toy! Fritz Obermeyer’s Jenn makes stereographic projections of most of the convex uniform tilings of the hypersphere; of the 64 Conway-Guy polychora only four (whose construction is somewhat anomalous) are missing. I downloaded the generic Unix version and easily … Continue reading

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | 1 Comment

beauty’s where you find it

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 … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics, music+verse | Leave a comment

elsewhere

Will Wilkinson debunks the notion that private charity would be better spent to “leverage” government spending — in other words, in rent-seeking.

Posted in economics, politics | Leave a comment

finite menu

One episode of Murder in Suburbia involves a mate-swapping club of four couples. (In this case, sex provides the opportunity but not the motive.) It occurred to me in my insomnia that, instead of drawing names from a hat, for … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

here and there

Claire Wolfe: The Quality of a Free Man (cited by Rational Review News Digest) James Leroy Wilson says some things that I have attempted to say about, for example, highways: Perhaps a genuinely free market would have seen the development … Continue reading

Posted in economics, politics, psychology | Leave a comment