spam title of the day: geosynchronous pickup truck

The first letter in this week’s Economist is from Nikolai Wenzel, assistant professor of economics at Hillsdale College, who says in part:

. . . as of 2004 only 55% of America’s health spending was private . . . . this 45% does not capture the so-called “Cadillac effect” that comes from the American Medical Association’s guild-like stranglehold on providing medical services, the distortion from the tax treatment of certain health and insurance expenses, and many other unseen costs of government regulation and subsidies.

I am fond of observing that my ideological opponents, whenever they want to gloat about the inadequacies of the private sector, invariably point to the most heavily subsidized and regulated industry of all; illustrating Hayek’s law that intervention creates distortion which provokes clamor for more intervention.

I got a spam for Viagra entitled unseemly nation, and 4 minutes later a Korean spam entitled RE: unseemly tomato.

time flows differently in the funnies (except Gasoline Alley and For Better or For Worse)

how to argue with a libertarian (Degrees of Freedom)

arguments against state support for schools, including some that I had not encountered before

I had the idea to design a fantasy script from combinations of a small repertoire of features: namely, subsets of this set of twelve segments. Using a fixed number of segments gives some built-in error-detection. There are 924 subsets of six segments; discarding those that form disconnected graphs leaves 306, more than enough for a syllabary. (Syllabaries have been invented more often than other types of scripts, but they’re underrepresented in fantasy.) ( . . more . . )

Amara Graps writes: “Not being a blogger, myself, I’m seeing if the bloggers I know want to pick up this story I wrote.”

What happened to Bush’s Cadillac 1?

As recorded by a viewer of the motorcade and posted to YouTube, it apparently sputtered to a stop. [The car first appears at 3:20 in this video.] It broke down, right there, on via del Tritone (near the Trevi fountain) in Rome, in the middle of the motorcade. He was ripe picking for a sharp shooter too; no wonder the police were pushing people further back, off of the street. ( . . more . . )

You may know from The Art of Computer Programming §4.1 (citing W. Penney, 1965) that, just as any positive real number can be represented by a bit string in base 2, any complex number can be represented by a bit string in base –1±i. Here I express the bits of that representation as bits of color values.

This is only an arbitrary crop of an image consisting of 2¹⁸ pixels; get 2²² colors (png, 373 KB). The full 24-bit version will have to wait for me to get cleverer about use of memory. (Later: Success.)

When I say I make mathematical pictures, the response often is: “Like fractals?” Some of my designs have chaotic reflections, but this is my first fractal in many years.