The last episode of series 3 of A Bit of Fry and Laurie had a courtroom skit in which one could be forgiven for thinking the judge represented the present occupant of the White House, as the actor in that role (a Canadian) resembled him physically and mangled words in a way widely parodied — but it was first shown in February 1992, before whatsisname sought the gubernatariat of Texas.
I had an unusually acute attack of despair this morning, likely aggravated by sleeping poorly. It was a bit of a struggle to drag myself out the door.
Another disadvantage of driving to work is that it offers too little distraction. I miss being able to read or nap on BART.
I’ve been catching up on Heroes (the link is to the first episode on NBC’s website). Episode 18 “Parasite” has an establishing shot of Las Vegas, an aerial view in daylight, which I did not recognize because establishing shots of Las Vegas are traditionally street-level and nocturnal, emphasizing the blinkenlights. (Though if the shot were longer I might guess it from the eccentric architecture and the distant mountains.) I knew it was Vegas because Hiro, last seen there, was in the next shot. I wonder what fraction of the viewers were as clueless as I was.
“So you want to write a fugue”
(by Glenn Gould)
2016: The embedding doesn’t work anymore, presumably because it used Flash; so here’s a link.
Nearly eight hours in the making, here it is: all the 24-bit colors in a tasteful, tilable fractal arrangement — 16million.png.gz (1 megabyte). And since Mads asked for it, the Python sourcecode: two files.
Another way to flatten the color cube is by traversing both the cube and the square with Hilbert curves, and continuously mapping one to the other. I’ll try that, one of these weeks.