Category Archives: sciences

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 | Leave a 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.

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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

what, more links?

Medical Guesswork (Business Week) The navel and the WTO antidote, by Sauvik Chakraverti a slightly naughty chuckle 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 … Continue reading

Posted in economics, medicine, tax+privacy | Leave a comment

scapegoats

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 … Continue reading

Posted in economics, history | 3 Comments