Fred Pohl two years ago: None of the four leading Republican presidential candidates is acceptable, because none has a plan to deal with global warming. Obama “is the only remaining hope we have”; he has no plan either, “but his options are still open.”

I hadn’t noticed before that my webhost offers MediaWiki. Some of the things I write here are not news, really, but things that sorta belong in my permanent exhibition but are too wordy for that page.

I’ll think about that.

I often have trouble giving meaningful concise names to variables in the programs I write, perhaps because, until I reach for the keyboard, my thinking is largely nonverbal. I suspect that it would be less of a problem for someone more exposed to the accumulated lore of programmer culture; though perhaps not in this case:

I’m thinking of breaking up this process into multiple rounds, to obtain increasing degrees of geometric continuity. The initial nodes would coincide with the input dots but have no defined theta (tangent angle) or kappa (curvature); the first round of replacements determines theta for G¹ continuity, the next round determines kappa (the first derivative of theta) for G² continuity — and subsequent rounds may seek higher degrees of continuity by matching further derivatives.

This means that the node object, instead of exactly two fields called theta and kappa, should have a list of theta and its known derivatives (one more than the current replacement-round needs), and I’m at a loss for a good name for this list.