seams in the infrastructure

Posted on Friday, 2012 August 24 by Anton

I had a visitor from beyond an arbitrary polygonal arc. When she got here, she asked, “Did you get my note?”

“What, today? No.”

“… Oops, I sent it from my Canadian phone. So when I get back to Canada, you’ll get a note saying I’m on my way!”

Posted in Cascadia | Leave a comment

PLG

Posted on Thursday, 2012 August 23 by Anton

Got an idea for a transhuman story element.

Assume that the technology exists to let you acquire fluency in a language of your choice as easily as you install a font on your computer. (Such technology figures in When Gravity Fails and probably bunches of other fiction.)

My idea is a Private Language Generator, which uses some source of true random noise to generate a language — syntax, phonology, morphology, lexicon — from the ground up, and install it using the interface assumed above. When two or more people use the device together, they acquire the ability to communicate ‘naturally’ in a language that no eavesdropper can interpret.

This leads to a new kind of traffic analysis. Any two people who Tweet in the same unknown language thereby expose their association. So maybe the PLG is not all that useful for secrecy. But lovers, for example, might use it for fun. (See also The Languages of Pao.)

Posted in language | 4 Comments

soap films in curved space

Posted on Monday, 2012 July 30 by Anton

A few of the many triply periodic minimal surfaces can be generated from a quadrilateral slice through a tetrahedron of mirrors, as refined by Surface Evolver. I had the idea that the same concept, applied to one of the analogous tetrahedra that tile spherical 3-space, could result in a pretty model.

To my disappointment, none of the non-prismatic kaleidoscopes — those that generate the six regular polychora — hosts a nondegenerate minimal surface (of this simple form); but each of the duoprism kaleidoscopes gives at least one.

(2018) One could try minimal surfaces with the constraint of partitioning into equal volumes, if one understood how to specify such a constraint in non-Euclidean space. Apparently it needs a metric tensor, whatever that is.

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

passerby

Posted on Tuesday, 2012 July 17 by Anton

When I die, I’d prefer to slip away unnoticed. Ideally, let there be no record of the dates of my birth and death, only a floruit.

Posted in me!me!me! | 2 Comments

divided by common letters

Posted on Tuesday, 2012 July 03 by Anton

I’ve been getting Russian spams in which some of the Cyrillic letters “Аа В Ее К М Н Оо Рр Сс Т у Хх” are replaced by the similar Latin letters “Aa B Ee K M H Oo Pp Cc T y Xx”, defeating Google Translate.

Posted in language, spam | 1 Comment

Zurker

Posted on Saturday, 2012 June 16 by Anton

What do you know, yet another social website.

Posted in society | 1 Comment

but wait there’s more

Posted on Thursday, 2012 June 14 by Anton


This one is a projection of a design on (half of) the surface of a hypersphere: a ribbon spans two orthogonal great circles, wrapping three times around one and five times around the other.

Kitty teeth did break it at one point, but with redundancy that’s not a serious problem. Having got my pix I’ll keep the new toys away from them henceforth.

Posted in mathematics, merch | Leave a comment