Spent yester evening with stepbrother and his rentmate. Conversation was largely about mathematics, and at some point they both got the giggles because (they said) I was manifesting mannerisms that they recognized from having taken physics from the same professor.

They did not go so far as to tell me what mannerisms.

The opening of Serenity has been postponed from April 22 to September 30. Joss Whedon says:

April got crowded with a lot of titles aimed at a similar demographic, and the studio [Universal Pictures] decided September was a clearer corridor for the film to make the kind of impact it should.

I felt a bit silly for not recognizing Jonathan Woodward when he played the vampire in Buffy 7:7 “Conversations with Dead People”. He looked familiar but I thought it was only because he resembles young Bill Murray. Then in the commentary Jane Espenson, a frequent writer for Mutant Enemy shows, mentions that he was in Firefly (“The Message”). Both episodes begin with his character in a coffin, and end with his death by chest trauma. (He’s also in Angel, apparently as a member of W&H’s staff in the last season.)

66 (out of 144) episodes of Buffy have a scene at a dance club called The Bronze, and the producers took advantage of it to showcase local bands. In 7:8 “Sleeper” the musician of the week is Aimee Mann, who again looks like someone I’ve met, if only I could remember who . . . .

On BART today, a fellow passenger saw me making notes on paper and occasionally looking up, and got the idea that I was taking statistics on the passengers. No, I said, I’m doing math for my own entertainment. He sat beside me and I explained it; he seemed to grasp more than I expected of a random layman. Finally he said, “But I still don’t see how the people come into it.”

The problem: to define

u(t) = Σ a_k cos(kt), 0 ≤ k ≤ 3

so that

u(0) = u(π) = 0
u(α) = 1
u′(α) = 0.

I solved it – it’s simple enough – but it did not make me happy; what I really wanted was for 0,1 to be global extrema, and I don’t know how to do that efficiently. So I guess it’s back to Fourier series.

(Note to self: certain symbols do not render properly in Lucida Sans Italic.)

At a party this evening, an Indian named Rādhā was surprised when I asked, “Do you spell it with an h?” Years ago I used to go often to Country Station Sushi Café on Mission Street, near which there is or was a Hotel Radha whose sign has the name written in Nāgarī.

The weather is now wintry enough that the backs of my hands have suddenly begun to go dry and red. This is my second or third winter with that effect. Haven’t found anything really effective for it. Most creams are scented, and anything scented gives me a rash.

In other seasonal news: this morning KOIT, to which I have lately been subjected for nine or ten hours most days, flipped a switch from Lite Rock with Less Talk (i.e. everything from Dan Fogelberg to Celine Dion) to The Only radio station that understands how You Feel about Christmas (and what’s the most fatheaded thing you‘ve heard today?). Oddly enough, it is an improvement: the supply of songs about sleighbells is not so great that they can exclude non-treacle and still fill the day.

This evening my One True Ex and I had yet another dinner that couldn’t be beat, at Ichiban, 22560 Foothill Blvd (at B St.), Hayward, 510-537-4466. Do me a favor and don’t tell them that their prices are too low.

From numbers tabulated by The Glittering Eye: the horizontal axis is the tax-consumption ratio, the vertical is the logarithm of income per capita. One extreme outlier is omitted, without guilt as it’s a special case.

In a perfect world the dots would represent counties, scaled for population, shaded according to the popular vote. But any of that would mean exerting effort.