cinema 1964

Posted on Friday, 2005 July 15 by Anton

As I may have mentioned before, I arrange my Netflix queue mostly by date. Since I caught up to my own birth, the number of movies per year has grown sharply, so this may be my longest post yet. Continue reading →

Posted in cinema | 1 Comment

One Of These Things

Posted on Thursday, 2005 July 14 by Anton

I’m looking at a banner ad that says

Q. Which is not like the others?
63 57 98 01

I saw quickly that none are prime (1 is usually not counted as prime, so that each integer’s prime factorization is unique) and then that two of the four are divisible by 3, and then a long pause before I saw that only one is even. Does that say something about me?

Posted in mathematics | 3 Comments

backfire

Posted on Thursday, 2005 July 14 by Anton

Over in Volokhia, Jim Lindgren (cited by Tom W Bell) points out a presumably unintended consequence of the atrocious Kelo decision: if commercial activity is “public use”, then it’s not taxable. Hee hee.

Posted in tax+privacy | Leave a comment

QotD

Posted on Tuesday, 2005 July 12 by Anton

“I think the world has been run long enough by well-meaning professionals. We might give the amateurs a chance now.”

—Carol Fisher in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Posted in cinema, politics | Leave a comment

time-sink of the week

Posted on Tuesday, 2005 July 12 by Anton

Planarity, a Flash puzzle: rearrange the vertices so that no edges cross. (Cited by Joshua Burton.)

When a solution is near, the program gets very slow, which seems backward. (Thursday: It has been changed to test only on the player’s request.)

How is the graph generated? Perhaps it starts with a Delaunay triangulation of a random set of vertices, and deletes edges until each vertex has degree 4, 3 or 2.

Posted in mathematics | 3 Comments

they can’t always be wrong

Posted on Monday, 2005 July 11 by Anton

You are elegant, withdrawn, and brilliant. Your mind is a weapon, able to solve any puzzle. You are also great at poking holes in arguments and common beliefs.

For you, comfort and calm are very important. You tend to thrive on your own and shrug off most affection. You prefer to protect your emotions and stay strong.
Posted in me!me!me!, psychology | 1 Comment

That all you got, punk?

Posted on Monday, 2005 July 11 by Anton

Dean Ing’s first novel Soft Targets (1979) suggested that against terrorists the most effective weapon is mockery. Since the London bombs I’ve seen hints of such an approach.

Arthur Silber (2006: that link is gone bad, here’s another) gets in a dig at another faction that favors indiscriminate violence:

. . . one has the sense that this kind of hawk (which is most of them now) can’t grasp the nature of a convincing argument. It is as if they believe that by shouting, over and over again, “But terrorists are really, really, really, REALLY evil!,” they will finally convince everyone who doubts or criticizes Bush’s foreign adventures that Bush is entirely right about everything. . . .

Posted in politics | Leave a comment