Category Archives: sciences

dot product of Cupid’s arrows

The backstory of Methuselah’s Children, by Heinlein, involves a foundation to promote human longevity. Among other activities it studies natural long-lifers, creating its research material by paying a bounty for marriages between people whose grandparents all lived 100 years or … Continue reading

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hope you don’t mind if I sit this one out

Looks like I’m staying home alone until a vaccine comes; it’s what I mostly do anyway, though I miss the weekly card games. As a libertarian, I do not presume to know what’s best for others. So, lucky me, I … Continue reading

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Scribbles: The Ensmoothening, Part III

Many of the curves in this chart have some unsightly wiggles. That’s because, when a function of degree 2 or higher tries to approximate a piecewise constant, it tends to go back and forth across the target. So here instead … Continue reading

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it’s in the literature

On a truncated icosahedron / buckyball / Telstar-style soccer ball, consider two adjacent hexagons and the two pentagons that are adjacent to both. These four faces can be removed, rotated by a right angle, and reattached, causing only a small … Continue reading

Posted in mathematics | 1 Comment

vision imperfect

This morning I saw a series of flashes (both bright and dark) in my left eye, along a peripheral arc. They’ve stopped for now but I also have some new floaters. I have a recurring urge to clean off the … Continue reading

Posted in me!me!me!, medicine | 3 Comments

another problem with my clothoids

I wrote: each curve hits alternate dots: first exactly, then with offsets pushing it toward the other curve. I don’t think I’ve mentioned here how the offsets work.

Posted in curve-fitting | 3 Comments

clothoid weekend update

For context, see past posts in the curve-fitting category that I just created. To recap: The curves I’ve been drawing are the paths made by a point moving at constant speed at an angle which is a piecewise quadratic function … Continue reading

Posted in curve-fitting | 2 Comments