off by one

Posted on Sunday, 2013 December 01 by Anton

A look at 404s in my HTTP log revealed a bug in my math pix page, which in two places chooses randomly from families of images. I didn’t know that the PHP function rand(nmin,nmax) is inclusive at both ends.

Posted in me!me!me!, neep-neep | Leave a comment

as many as it takes

Posted on Saturday, 2013 November 16 by Anton

allRGB: images in which each of 16 million colors occurs exactly once. (Found at MathPuzzle.) I see I’m not the only one to think of the Hilbert curve idea, but I’ll post two others.

In unrelated news, I was surprised today to find some late blackberries, bland but wholesome.

Posted in Cascadia, eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

Dear sir or madam: It’s important in today’s economy to cover all bases.

Posted on Tuesday, 2013 November 05 by Anton

Funny spam comment:

{The Secret|The Main Element {To|In order to|For you to|To help you|If you would like|If you want to totally|On the way to|When you need to}} master the moncler-market Is Rather Straight foward!

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limited voice recognition?

Posted on Saturday, 2013 October 26 by Anton

When I answer the ’phone, I generally say either “Yes?” or “Good day/evening, Sherwoods” rather than “Hello.” With cold-callers I often don’t get a response to that; I pause and try a variation or two of “Is someone there?” before the caller speaks up with a bewildered “Hello?”.

Does their robo-dialer wait for a “Hello” before prompting the human that it has found a live line?

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a shifting role

Posted on Saturday, 2013 October 12 by Anton

The original Nikita (1990) and the American remake Point of No Return (1993) had a minor character called Victor the Cleaner — played by Jean Reno and Harvey Keitel respectively — whose specialty was making evidence, such as bodies, disappear.

Reno returned in Léon (1994), again as a “cleaner”, but this time “cleaner” meant assassin.

In the current TV series Nikita, “cleaner” again means assassin. I wonder how far this usage has spread.

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has self-parody always been a thing?

Posted on Thursday, 2013 September 19 by Anton

The movie Taras Bulba (1962) opens with a narration. I thought: Have I heard that narrator before? Have I heard a parody of that narrator?

Yes and yes. It was Paul Frees, who also narrated Dudley Do-Right.

Posted in cinema | 1 Comment

i am but mad north-north-west

Posted on Thursday, 2013 September 19 by Anton

On average, my cats don’t ask for much attention; a head-rub suffices for half the day. For a few days recently, they were much more demanding. Perhaps it was the change in the weather; we’ve had a week or so of autumn, though Thursday was summery again.

Posted in Cascadia, pets | Leave a comment