am I keeping you awake?

Posted on Thursday, 2005 June 23 by Anton

This post from Shanghai makes me wonder how widespread is the notion of counting sheep.

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Studio Gibberish

Posted on Wednesday, 2005 June 22 by Anton

Miyazaki’s film (ハウルの動く城) of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Howl’s Moving Castle is pretty, of course, but the story got lost somewhere. The royal sorceress has an unexplained grudge against Howl, an eccentric but kind young wizard with an unexplained reputation for crimes against beautiful girls; several people are afflicted by curses; and there’s a war on. But true love puts things right in the end. Okay, whatever.

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the asynchronous world

Posted on Monday, 2005 June 20 by Anton

WiReD summarizes the work of Kiwi maverick philosopher Peter Lynds:

His answers make the mathematics of space and time look strange. If instants don’t exist, then calculus – in which equations depend on fixed before-and-after positions in space – doesn’t accurately describe reality.

Er, what? How does calculus depend on fixed positions?

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fun with topology

Posted on Friday, 2005 June 17 by Anton

It’s surprising that I had not heard before of the mathematical sculptor Rinus Roelofs. His Möbius-double could be seen as a metaphor for half-spin particles.

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

goody linkness

Posted on Thursday, 2005 June 16 by Anton

John Cowan writes:

There’s a Dell one and a Sun one
And a Blue one and a Compaq one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all run just the same.

One patient’s account of depression lifted by electrodes. (Cited by SciTech Daily.)

Greg Cochran, whom I once knew slightly, is mentioned in The Economist for his theory that the high rate of neural disorders among Ashkenazi Jews is a result of natural selection for intelligence. (Also cited by SciTech Daily.)

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crickets chirping

Posted on Thursday, 2005 June 16 by Anton

This site’s traffic declined sharply in May; likely because referral spam suddenly went out of style.

Posted in me!me!me!, spam | 1 Comment

tales from the black box

Posted on Thursday, 2005 June 16 by Anton

Wow. Shortly after Simon Ng posted this blog entry —

. . .
today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon . . .

— the visitor stabbed him to death. (Cited by Nev Dull)

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