a frustrating kind of fame

Posted on Thursday, 2003 August 14 by Anton

Somebody posted one of my Doodles to a board in Thailand and I don’t know anyone who can translate the text there. Boo hoo.

Posted in eye-candy | Leave a comment

what’s Spanish for ‘nice try’?

Posted on Thursday, 2003 August 14 by Anton

Got a spam today that reads:

Important notice

We have just charged your credit card for money laundry service in amount of $234.65 (because you are either child pornography webmaster or deal with dirty money, which require us to layndry them and then send to your checking account).
If you feel this transaction was made by our mistake, please press “No”.
If you confirm this transaction, please press “Yes” and fill in the form below.

Enter your credit card number here:

Enter your credit card expiration date:

Contacts:
Phone: +5982 902 5627
Fax: +5982 902 3114
E-mail: support@fethard.biz
ICQ: 156746629

(The telephone is in Uruguay.)

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mommie Russia dearest

Posted on Thursday, 2003 August 14 by Anton

Maria Farrell relays the story that eight prisoners at Gitmo are begging not to be sent ‘home’ to Russia. History repeats?

Posted in militaria | Leave a comment

tax matters

Posted on Tuesday, 2003 August 12 by Anton

Carl Worden writes in Sierra Times:

Now pinch yourself and review this astonishing turn of events: A highly trained and educated federal prosecutor in Memphis was unable to convince 12 American citizens that Vernice Kuglin was required to pay federal income taxes. He was clearly unable to produce a single section of the Tax Code to that end, and the jury was unanimous in clearing Kuglin of all charges against her. If the foregoing was not so, Kuglin would have been convicted.

I remain puzzled. Continue reading →

Posted in law, tax+privacy | Leave a comment

naming the polytopes

Posted on Monday, 2003 August 11 by Anton

The Pythagoreans, legend has it, saw each of the regular solids as a symbol of one of the elements: tetrahedron fire, octahedron air, icosahedron water, cube earth — leaving the dodecahedron to stand for the universe, or quintessence, or spirit. It’s rather a pity that they weren’t so named, pyromorph, aeromorph, hydromorph, geomorph, cosmomorph; the nomenclature of the other uniform polytopes (particularly those of four dimensions) would be somewhat cleaner.

2004 Oct 04: It is a charming coincidence that the cosmos was briefly suspected of being cosmomorphic.

Posted in humanities, sciences | 6 Comments

damned Redmond again . . .

Posted on Monday, 2003 August 11 by Anton

So this personnel agent asks me to add some items to my résumé and mail it to her. No sweat. I keep the thing in HTML, because it’s convenient and relatively efficient. But when my agent gets it, oh dear, she sees no icon showing the attachment (because HTML is a format that Outlook understands, so it displays the content rather than a mere icon) and so she can’t save my résumé in her database and mail it to the client. Could I possibly put it in (I groan in anticipation) Word?

So I go to my housemate’s computer, download résumé.html (2617 bytes), open it in MessyWord, save it in Redmond format (23552 bytes), mail it to myself, save it, and mail that to the agent.

Argh. Such irony: her convenience requires the file to be in a format that her mail client cannot read; and so I send it in a format with the most generic extension — .doc — which Their own mail client treats as alien.

Posted in neep-neep | 1 Comment

transportation disasters of the future

Posted on Sunday, 2003 August 10 by Anton

Blaise Gassend charts what happens to an object that falls from the Space Elevator.

Posted in futures, sciences | Leave a comment