cinema 2012

This week I watched two movies that coincidentally opened in the same week in 2012. Neither delighted me.

In Looper, the terrible threat to be averted is a gangster bent on — gasp — wiping out a group of retired killers. I should care? The targets aren’t even interesting: they’re not so much hitmen, which would suggest some need for cleverness in their métier, as overpaid slaughterhouse workers.
In the end, why does Joe’s “change” (it’s a time travel story) erase Sara’s death but not Cid’s wound?

Seven Psychopaths is self-consciously ironic, “transgressive” and self-referential; nothing here that hasn’t been done better.

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get off my lawn

Saturday I missed a birthday party because I’m not on Facebook. So it goes.

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unapologetically one-sided

My newest design on Shapeways is a model of the Lawson-Klein surface : a stereographic projection of

( cos(u)cos(2v), cos(u)sin(2v), sin(u)cos(v), sin(u)sin(v) )

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about that sex thing

I recently read the uncut Stranger in a Strange Land (having read the shorter version long long ago, probably before puberty). It contains the phrase “she’s as female as a cat in heat,” which also appears in the same author’s later Time Enough for Love; in each case it appears to be intended as a compliment.

Now that I know a bit about cat sexuality, I think: what, she’s ruled by her gonads even more than a 17yo boy, and miserable until she gets a rather unpleasant chore done?

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faith-based voting

Fred Pohl two years ago: None of the four leading Republican presidential candidates is acceptable, because none has a plan to deal with global warming. Obama “is the only remaining hope we have”; he has no plan either, “but his options are still open.”

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oddly tempting

I hadn’t noticed before that my webhost offers MediaWiki. Some of the things I write here are not news, really, but things that sorta belong in my permanent exhibition but are too wordy for that page.

I’ll think about that.

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naming is hard

I often have trouble giving meaningful concise names to variables in the programs I write, perhaps because, until I reach for the keyboard, my thinking is largely nonverbal. I suspect that it would be less of a problem for someone more exposed to the accumulated lore of programmer culture; though perhaps not in this case:

I’m thinking of breaking up this process into multiple rounds, to obtain increasing degrees of geometric continuity. The initial nodes would coincide with the input dots but have no defined theta (tangent angle) or kappa (curvature); the first round of replacements determines theta for G¹ continuity, the next round determines kappa (the first derivative of theta) for G² continuity — and subsequent rounds may seek higher degrees of continuity by matching further derivatives.

This means that the node object, instead of exactly two fields called theta and kappa, should have a list of theta and its known derivatives (one more than the current replacement-round needs), and I’m at a loss for a good name for this list.

Posted in curve-fitting, neep-neep | 4 Comments