I’m just sayin’

Posted on Monday, 2015 April 20 by Anton

A free market would not say to the poor, “It’s cute that you want to earn money by providing a service, but first we need you to save up for a license.”

Posted in economics, politics | Leave a comment

adrift in a sea of time

Posted on Wednesday, 2015 March 11 by Anton

In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), the narrator says or implies that the events happened many years ago; so I’ve been watching for details that date it. Oprah Winfrey, whose show premiered in 1986, is mentioned; I think that’s the terminus post quem. More than anything else I’ve been struck by names of cigarettes: Silva-Thin, Vantage, Kool. Maybe these seem dated to me because I’ve been less exposed to tobacco advertising since ~1981.

Posted in prose | Leave a comment

Awake how often?

Posted on Monday, 2015 March 02 by Anton

The protagonist of the TV series Awake lives in two worlds: one in which his wife died in a car crash, and one in which their son died instead. As we see it, he spends a day in Hannah’s timeline and then a day in Rex’s, alternating.

But (in the four episodes I’ve seen so far) no one ever asks him where he goes on the other days. On the other hand, if he lives each calendar day twice in sequence, he ought to be able to use knowledge of events unrelated to his family to win the occasional bet, and I haven’t seen him do that.

So I choose to suppose that his awareness forks each morning, and rejoins when he sleeps, so that he always has two yesterdays, neither preceding the other.

Posted in cinema | 3 Comments

elusive avoidance

Posted on Monday, 2015 January 26 by Anton

I’ve been designing printable models of the Lawson-Klein surface

w = cos(u) cos(2v)
x = cos(u) sin(2v)
y = sin(u) cos(v)
z = sin(u) sin(v)

As you can plainly see, this figure lives in S3 (positively curved 3-space), so stereographic projection can bring it into E3 (Euclidean 3-space) without adding more self-intersections. (It crosses itself at u=nπ.)

To minimize the distortion of the projection, I want the projection center to be as far as possible from the surface. One thing I tried was pursuit: starting with an arbitrary point P in S3 and an arbitrary point L(u,v) in the surface, move (u,v) to bring L closer to P while simultaneously moving P away from L. This gets me nowhere so far: either it fails to converge or P converges to the antipodes of L, which is also in the surface (change u by π).

Posted in mathematics, merch | 2 Comments

self-referential

Posted on Sunday, 2014 December 07 by Anton

A recent comment on this blog from someone named ‘air jordan 1 ebay’:

Hello, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam responses? […]

Yes. Yes, I do.

Posted in spam | 1 Comment

need a pun here about music and cryptography

Posted on Thursday, 2014 November 27 by Anton

Given a piece of music written for just intonation, clearly you could derive another piece by replacing all factors of 3 with factors of 5 and vice versa (or pick some other pair of primes). Sometimes the result might even be good.

Posted in music+verse | 1 Comment

hidden dragon

Posted on Monday, 2014 November 24 by Anton

For years I’ve occasionally had a mysterious itch at my lowest left rib, nothing showing on the skin. Now it has spread rightward at the same altitude, making me think: could this be mild shingles?

Posted in me!me!me!, medicine | Leave a comment