Subject: The Concept of a Meta-Font
Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2004 03:18:42 -0700
From: Anton Sherwood
To: knuth-bugDigital Typography page 312, near the middle of note [11]
759,499,667,966,482 [ = 2 * 19 * 3717809 * 5375971 ]
should be
759,499,667,166,482 [ = 2 * 11^14 ]
The same error is listed as corrected in Selected Papers page 41.
Today I received the coveted bounty. Woohoo!
better than average as unelected rulers go
Will Wilkinson on State Autonomy and Electoral Triviality
I once went on a date with an EPA lawyer. I said to her, more or less, this is my guess about what you do . . . A new environmental law is passed. The EPA people decide whether they like it or not. If they like it, they enforce it. If they don’t like it, they think, “What would we like the law to mean?” They then try to find a way of interpreting the language to reflect their, rather than congress’s preferences. The lawyers then think about who will sue them if they interpret the law this way, and whether they would win the suit. If they can’t win, they reinterpret it in a way that maybe doesn’t reflect their preferences as much, but which is more likely to stand up in court. Once they’ve got a winner, they implement, and prepare for the likely suit.
She said, “That’s almost exactly what I do.”
Christopher Westley: Why Be Proud of Government Work?
Recently, when walking home from work, I was passed by one of those red monster pick-up trucks with an oversized bumper sticker on the back window that announced: FORMER MARINE.
It made me wonder why it is that Marines are the only federal employees who feel the urge to proclaim that they once were paid with taxpayer loot. You never see Volkswagens buzzing around town with a sign that says FORMER POSTAL WORKER, or Lexuses chugging down the street with a sticker proclaiming FORMER FEDERAL FISHERIES STAFF ACCOUNTANT.
Educated Guesswork relays graphs – purporting to be from the ONDCP, no less – showing that the retail prices of heroin, cocaïne and methamphetamine (as adjusted for purity as well as currency inflation) declined fairly steadily between 1981 and 2001, while THC (marijuana) peaked in 1991 and has since returned to near its 1981 price.
Remind me again, is the objective of the DEA to make drugs more or less available?
why he calls it “Twinkie Defense” is beyond me
Friend Perry Metzger begins the bloguine.
“I wonder how often Angela Lansbury has played somebody evil” (as in The Manchurian Candidate which is on KQED now).
“Not nearly often enough.”
I’ve just seen An American in Paris, whose supporting cast includes the pianist Oscar Levant, who also said:
My psychiatrist once said to me, “Maybe life isn’t for everyone.”
Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.
I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.
The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.
Last night I watched (for the second time ever) The Man in the White Suit, one of the famous Ealing comedies – though perhaps it’s called that only by association. Like the crime farces Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers, it was made by Ealing Studios and stars Alec Guinness, who here plays Sidney Stratton, the crank chemist whose indestructible polymer threatens to ruin the textile industry.
A super-fiber has uses beyond clothing and thus would in all likelihood increase the demand for fiber rather than ending it. (Never mind that no single fiber can replace all existing fibers, even if it does last forever.) This never occurs to any of the characters in TMitWS, and much unhappiness results. I call that a tragedy.