Monthly Archives: August 2006

another batch of miscellany

I was awakened this morning by geese. What do they talk about as they fly? Flickr gallery capturing people’s reactions on seeing goatse for the first time. (Cited in a comment on Malfunction Junction.) A novel method for the removal … Continue reading

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a perfect caper

Today I watched Inside Man, my first Spike Lee joint since She’s Gotta Have It (1986) and, even more surprisingly, my first Denzel Washington ever. It’s swell. My housemate said after the opening shot, “Clive Owen is so great I’ll … Continue reading

Posted in cinema | 1 Comment

security theater kills

Fake identifying documents save lives in Iraq: At any time, the relevant authorities in Iraq could have decreed that all people get (as near as possible) forgery-proof biometric ID cards and carry them at all times – a great way … Continue reading

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spam title of the week

nun isn’t weatherproof

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one, um . . .

Number Systems of the World: lists of number-words from 0 to 100, ranked, somewhat arbitrarily, by “complexity”. (Cited by LanguageHat.) To me the most remarkable is Alamblak (#7) whose number-words are all compounded from the words for 1, 2, 5 … Continue reading

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Jenn

New toy! Fritz Obermeyer’s Jenn makes stereographic projections of most of the convex uniform tilings of the hypersphere; of the 64 Conway-Guy polychora only four (whose construction is somewhat anomalous) are missing. I downloaded the generic Unix version and easily … Continue reading

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beauty’s where you find it

I mis-heard some trivial question as “What is Hamming music?” For some of us, the name Hamming is strongly associated with information theory, and so I imagined that “Hamming music” must be algorithmic composition using error-correcting principles. And that got … Continue reading

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