I’m too literal-minded. When I hear corporate puff like
None of this would have been possible without the complete dedication and teamwork of every one of you in this room
I think, wow, just imagine all the grand projects that vanished without a trace because one of several hundred drones either lacked complete dedication or was hit by a bus.
A new participant on Wikipedia, with an axe to grind, wrote to me:
I’ve seen your articles. Devout liberal garbage that even your own administrators bash you for writing.
Less than a week later, that editor has been banned for persistently trying to use Wikipedia to push political agenda — and now I’ll never know what that crack was about. I have administrators?
Hm, Shapeways has an API. If I were a skilled Web programmer I’d make a page where you can choose the size and frequencies of a Klein bagel model …
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!”
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.)
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.
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.