amazing restraint

Roderick Long defines right-conflationism as defending existing economic structures as if they were outcomes of a genuinely free market (what Kevin Carson calls vulgar libertarianism), and left-conflationism as using those outcomes to attack the concept of free markets. I hope my paraphrasing doesn’t offend either of them.

Left-conflationism asks us to believe that Big Business, through its corrupt control of legislatures, prevents political interference in the market and goes no further; that mere market freedom allows it to loot us so thoroughly that it does not seek subsidies or protection from competition.

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n-k-1

The blog “Degrees of Freedom”, which had been inactive for some time when last I looked at it, has vanished. James, do you still visit here?

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preprocessor fail

I’ve been getting comments like this: Continue reading

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late antiquity

An argument is offered that New Zealand is the wrong place to film Tolkien’s works:

One of Tolkien’s great accomplishments was making Middle-earth seem vividly old. Wherever the reader looks, ruins and crumbling statues poke through the lichen. […]

To do justice to Tolkien—to capture the essence of Middle-earth—a filmmaker needs to convey that sensibility. And the problem with New Zealand is that it is decidedly young—both geologically and as a place inhabited by people. […]

The criticism of tone is valid, but on the other hand: our world is, by definition, older than Bilbo’s; Tolkien had no grasp of geology anyway; Eriador has been depopulated (why?) for a thousand years by Bilbo’s time, and Rhovanion always was relatively empty.

Posted in cinema, prose | 2 Comments

do you speak my calendar?

In MacBSD, the command cal 9 1752 shows the shortening of that month in the British Empire. If I reinstall MacOS and choose Italian as its default language, will the shift show up instead in October 1582?

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off by one

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

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