a rifled revolver

Posted on Saturday, 2004 December 25 by Anton

In the first episode of Have Gun Will Travel (1957), Paladin points out that his custom-made revolver has a rifled barrel, “a rarity in a hand weapon.” Say what?!

Posted in cinema, weapons | Leave a comment

mark your calendar

Posted on Saturday, 2004 December 25 by Anton

Asteroid 2004MN4 is an exceptionally high impact threat: the boffins give it one chance in 45 of intersecting with Earth on 2029 April 13.

Monday: Or not; newer measurements have taken that date off the list, though they still give 2004MN4 one chance in about thirty thousand of hitting us sometime in the coming century.

Posted in astronomy | 1 Comment

a hacker’s tale

Posted on Friday, 2004 December 24 by Anton

I hope this yarn is true: one of my favorite MacOS toys was developed clandestinely.

We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.

(Cited by Travis.)

Posted in neep-neep | Leave a comment

temporal foreshortening

Posted on Friday, 2004 December 24 by Anton

On a private mailing list someone wrote:

having just seen the 1951 Britisher version of the Dickens Christmas Carol, it struck me that free marketeers should really live in Dickensian England and try work their way out from the bottom.

I thought of writing a rant about Dickens’s sins, but a better approach presented itself:

FYI

1838: Oliver Twist

1843: A Christmas Carol

1846: repeal of the Corn Laws — commonly cited as the first triumph of the free trade movement

Posted in economics, prose | Leave a comment

arm’s length

Posted on Friday, 2004 December 24 by Anton

Tyler Cowen (cited by Travis) quotes a NYT article:

. . . participants [at a retreat for autistics] . . . can wear color-coded badges that indicate whether they are willing to be approached for conversation.

and remarks:

I will be very happy if this ever becomes socially acceptable practice for non-autistics . . . 

When I had a cubicle to call my own, I would sometimes put up a little sign:

CAUTION
TEMPORARY ACUTE SURLINESS ZONE

No one ever gave me grief about it, and I can’t recall that anyone even asked what it meant; I guess they assumed I was busy.

Posted in psychology | 1 Comment

Doctor Matrix’s little helpers

Posted on Friday, 2004 December 24 by Anton

Ed Pegg writes:

I’d like to do a “behind the scenes” look at Mathematical Games for an article. Martin [Gardner] did lots, but he avidly used a lot of help from hundreds of people. I’d like to write an article about the background help. If you ever assisted in one of Martin’s columns, I’d like to hear from you — a note about what you did. I’ll use these notes in my article.

A link from Pegg leads indirectly to a collection of weird and wonderful algorithmic paintings.

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

linky

Posted on Thursday, 2004 December 23 by Anton

contrarian road design

the GI Bill: a bad thing

Posted in general | Leave a comment