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?
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.”
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.
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.
A change to the law of royal succession has been enacted by some of the 16 Commonwealth Realms, to become effective when all of them have done so. Its most conspicuous feature is removing the preference for male heirs, but only from those sons born after 28 October 2011 (the date of the conference where the terms were decided).
Rather than the date cutoff, it would be simpler in my humble opinion to make explicit exceptions for past cases where sex trumped seniority. There are only two since the last change (1702) in succession law; thus: The descendants of King George III shall precede those of his elder sister Augusta, Duchess of Brunswick; and the descendants of King Edward VII shall precede those of his elder sister Victoria, German Empress.
Augusta’s heir by sex-neutral primogeniture appears to be Prince Alexander of Wied, born 1960, unless her first great-granddaughter Marie of Württemberg (1807–1865), countess of Neipperg, had issue not mentioned in Wikipedia.
Victoria(jr)’s heir by the same rule is Dr Friederike von der Osten, born 1959.
This curve-fitting thingy is one of several projects on which I’ve made progress in rare fits over several years. It ran into two big snags. I haven’t found how to determine which gridpoints are within the pen-width of a blending arc; two methods that ought to work don’t. (What would help: tutoring in drawing pictures in a MacOS display, so that I might have a better idea where they go wrong. And a pony.)
The other snag is this: For each pair of arcs, there is an infinite family of blending arcs; how to choose the osculation points to minimize rapid changes in curvature, while meeting the gridpoint constraints? Continue reading
In Watch on the Rhine (1943; screenplay by Dashiell Hammett from a play by Lillian Hellman) the penniless Count remarks,
Blecher, we do not like each other.
The Nazi to whom he hopes to sell information replies,
But that will not stand in the way of our doing business.
To link such a sentiment to fascism implies a remarkable kind of snobbery.