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 built it on my Mac.
The author has responded cheerfully to my comments.
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.
Will Wilkinson debunks the notion that private charity would be better spent to “leverage” government spending — in other words, in rent-seeking.
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 a small fixed group it would be efficient to prepare a set of cards for the 24 permutations (or the nine derangements). Any of the participants could then veto a potential partner by removing six (or three) of the cards.
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 of organic economies driven by local production and less on mass production and trade. People might have less of what they didn’t need anyway, and lead quiet, simple, but happy and stress-free lives. Or perhaps the free market would have taken us to unimagined technological heights and a prosperous and peaceful planetary economy.
I find both possibilities appealing. And that is why, ultimately, I can’t advance a libertarian worldview that exalts one vision over the other . . . .
Leftovers from September: Trapped in New Orleans: First By the Floods, Then By Martial Law
Medical Guesswork (Business Week)
The navel and the WTO antidote, by Sauvik Chakraverti
When Bigots Become Reformers: The Progressive Era’s shameful record on race (Reason)
Arnold Kling: Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism
an annoying conversation that every libertarian has sooner or later, in template form (Degrees of Freedom)
Mom is in town, and yesterday we went to the Arts & Crafts exhibit at the de Young.
One of the wall placards says, “The problems caused by free trade and the Industrial Revolution had been recognized since the 1830s . . . .”
The part about free trade is easy to debunk: the first triumph of the British free trade movement was the repeal in 1846 (motivated in part by the Irish famine) of the protectionist Corn Laws.
The plight of the working classes before that is familiar from Oliver Twist (1837–9) and A Christmas Carol (1843), but since I can’t see how industrialization itself could cause it, I prefer to blame the Inclosure Acts which dispossessed small landholders and thus depressed wages (while the Corn Laws kept food prices high). The new industrialists naturally took advantage of cheap labor, but one cannot reduce wages by offering employment.