Monthly Archives: May 2006

the panes of perception

Once, years ago, I got new eyeglasses and was startled because the world seemed flat. I had come to rely on blur as a distance cue, and that was suddenly taken from me. The effect was brief; binocularity reasserted itself … Continue reading

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things that go round

weird orbits (cited by John Baez) rotating infrared Titan

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how sick on average?

I’ve been hearing on the radio a statement that hospital emergency rooms in California admit 25 thousand people every hour. That’s equivalent to the entire population every eight weeks. –??–

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I could get a swelled head

Someone wrote to me out of the blue with a mathematical question. Though the statement of the problem was not clear enough for me to solve it, I told him how I’d approach it, and he was happy. I asked … Continue reading

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cinema 1966

大菩薩峠 (Dai-Bosatsu Pass aka Sword of Doom) (dir. 岡本 喜八,). The fight scenes are more preposterous than average: not only do the red shirts attack the champion one by one rather than rushing him, they seem to be aiming to … Continue reading

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QotD

Solutions to this [public goods] problem in the context of basic research are discussed at some length by Terence Kealey. (The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) Knowledge of current cutting edge research – Kealey’s … Continue reading

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easy diagnosis

Google Mail does a good job of catching spam, but a mediocre job of flagging “phishing” fraud within the spam trap. One very simple clue: if it contains <a href=”http://scamhost.ru/paypal/”>http://www.paypal.com/</a> it’s not likely to be kosher.

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