Pretty things: hyperbolic planar tesselations by Don Hatch. Presented in the conformal Poincaré disc mapping, which is the most common; it’s analogous to stereographic projection of a sphere. Another favorite mapping is the half-plane, which has no analogue that I can think of.

But I’ve never seen a conformal ‘Mercator’ mapping, preserving one line. Instead of a circle, the infinite hyperbolic plane would become an infintely long but finitely wide strip; Escher’s Circle Limit, transformed through such a projection, would make a nifty frieze (or runner rug).

Sadly I’ve yet to find enough information (clear enough for my lazy mind) on doing stuff in hyperbolic space.

People say a lot of unkind things about John Glenn, and I won’t rule out the possibility that there might be good reasons for that. But I’d like to record that he did one good thing that I’ll never forget.

Seven years ago, a Republican majority had just taken power in Congress, threatening a number of reforms, including a rule that all legislation must carry a preamble specifying its Constitutional authority. If I am not misinformed, it was the Senator from Low Earth Orbit who naïvely blurted, “But that would make most of what we do illegal!”

Last night I mentioned linguists and misguided egalitarians in the same breath, and it occurs to me that some might take that somehow as a swipe at a certain public figure. Let me assure both my readers that I was thinking of no commie in particular; it’s merely that language is a perennial interest of mine and the jargon was handy.

Jay Zilber looks at a burning issue.

Several blogs today have mentioned a certain former president of Megaserbia Jugoslavija; and that reminded me of Private Eye’s log of the twenty-two last chances in 1991-99.

Oh dear. Tony Adragna frets about tax havens:

. . . not all activity in tax havens is questionable, but when the activity has as its primary purpose the avoidance of taxation, then we run afoul of the letter and spirit of the tax code.

I wonder how Adragna feels about emigration, which so often is nothing more than avoidance of the laws at home.

Rich Hailey asks whether “becoming a libertarian [is] a good way to meet chicks.” I gotta say no, at least not in San Francisco. (Although, come to think of it, the last time I got lucky was with someone who gave me a ride home from a California LP convention.)
Try becoming an Anachronist.