Category Archives: sciences

how’s your German?

I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes … Continue reading

Posted in language, mathematics, neep-neep | 3 Comments

it’s a day for anniversaries

Several important things happened on April 19, but here’s one of which I was unaware: Charles Darwin died on this date in 1882. It came to my attention because the bookmark of the hour happens to be the Darwin-L archives. … Continue reading

Posted in history, sciences | Leave a comment

give me liberty or give me subsidies

Will Wilkinson spanks someone or other at The New Yorker for worrying too much about income inequality and disregarding the psychological benefits of autonomy.

Posted in economics | Leave a comment

did you bring enough to share?

In the old Bill Cosby Show, Chet Kincaid was a PE teacher who, in one memorable episode, substituted for an algebra teacher. (Come to think of it, that episode was probably my first exposure to algebra!) Does anyone remember the … Continue reading

Posted in cinema, mathematics | 1 Comment

the urge to meddle

I recently began contributing to Wikipedia; my biggest contribution so far is these tables of convex uniform polychora (the data are borrowed, the arrangement mine). After a few days of this, wherever I see a webpage with awkward language I … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics, me!me!me! | Leave a comment

fifty-two choose five

So I was writing a little allegorical paragraph which invited the reader to imagine a poker game in which a dispute arises over whether a flush beats a straight or not. “(The one holding the straight,” I explained, “is a … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

another one

Everyone’s doing it, and now David Friedman is doing it. What’s wild is that my bookmark chooser showed me his home page, with a prominent link to “My New Blog”, about eleven hours after his first post.

Posted in blogdom, economics, law | Leave a comment