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.)

Posted in psychology | Leave a comment

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)

Posted in blogdom | Leave a comment

damned if you don’t

Posted on Wednesday, 2005 June 15 by Anton

I’m likely to want to refer to this later:

One of his friends was contemplating becoming involved in a drug-distribution scheme, and telephoned Nguyen for advice. After a lengthy conversation, Nguyen advised the friend to stay away from the scheme, that it would only lead to trouble. The conversation was taped, and Nguyen was charged as a co-conspirator in a scheme to distribute drugs. Did you notice that? He advised against becoming involved in the scheme, but was still charged.

(Cited by Mary Lou Seymour)

Posted in drugwar | Leave a comment

adventures in fruit

Posted on Sunday, 2005 June 12 by Anton

New experience of the day: I found a little white spider in a bunch of Mexican grapes.

Posted in general | 2 Comments

a gap in the library

Posted on Friday, 2005 June 10 by Anton

Latin ecce, Italian ecco, Russian vot, French voilà, Esperanto jen — the nearest English equivalent I can think of is lo!, which is not in most bilingual dictionaries, for the same reason English-speakers know the word voilà. So how do I look up such a word in my English-Spanish dictionary?

Comments are always open: can you add to (or correct) the list?

Posted in language | 4 Comments