Travis doesn’t like “bioethicists” either.

Dick Fischbeck has a new website for a kind of structure that he calls Randome, formed of overlapping shallow cones.

Gary Becker and Richard Posner have a blog (any day now)

Mike Linksvayer attended a lecture on “Changes in the Disparities in Chronic Diseases During the Course of the Twentieth Century”.

Perry Metzger shares a report (pdf) on infrastructure in Somalia. (Later: Michael Tennant comments on it at Strike The Root.)

Mike also has a map showing the potential partition of Ukraine. He wraps up:

It’s time to stop thinking of nation states as sacred and inviolable entities that must be held together with violence in opposition to the wishes of inhabitants, [rather than] as service providers that must peacefully change and differentiate to best meet the needs of inhabitants.
. . . .
So long as freedom to live and work in all parts of the formerly unified state is maintained for all citizens of the smaller states, there need be no negatives for individual citizens, apart from a loss of irrational nationalistic feeling for the unified state, which will eventually transfer to the smaller states in those with the need for such feelings. I’d be happy to see the U.S. split into fifty separate countries under such terms.

(afterthought 2009) I would hope that most citizens keep an attachment to the wider region’s culture, rather than to the successor state.

On BART today, a fellow passenger saw me making notes on paper and occasionally looking up, and got the idea that I was taking statistics on the passengers. No, I said, I’m doing math for my own entertainment. He sat beside me and I explained it; he seemed to grasp more than I expected of a random layman. Finally he said, “But I still don’t see how the people come into it.”

The problem: to define

u(t) = Σ a_k cos(kt), 0 ≤ k ≤ 3

so that

u(0) = u(π) = 0
u(α) = 1
u′(α) = 0.

I solved it – it’s simple enough – but it did not make me happy; what I really wanted was for 0,1 to be global extrema, and I don’t know how to do that efficiently. So I guess it’s back to Fourier series.

(Note to self: certain symbols do not render properly in Lucida Sans Italic.)

At a party this evening, an Indian named Rādhā was surprised when I asked, “Do you spell it with an h?” Years ago I used to go often to Country Station Sushi Café on Mission Street, near which there is or was a Hotel Radha whose sign has the name written in Nāgarī.

Inherit the Wind somehow never mentioned that the evilutionist textbook used by John Scopes was racist and eugenist. Jim Lindgren, Volokh Conspirator, has the story.

This is intended to be an orthographic projection of a stereographic projection from S5 (the five-dimensional surface of a sphere in six-dimensional space) into E5 (flat five-space) of the cartesian product S2 × S2, a kind of torus. The colors represent the three suppressed dimensions.

I did not expect it to look like this, but then, I did not know what to expect.