a great icosahedron

Posted on Sunday, 2002 May 26 by Anton

. . made in PoV-Ray using a couple of beta features. I took the liberty of naming the pigment “Tufte” : it uses unsaturated colors to represent angles in a natural way.

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your tweezers, please

Posted on Sunday, 2002 May 26 by Anton

Security can be more about power trips than safe travel. Hooray, we cranks are not alone in saying it. (Link from Monty Solomon.)

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the final enemy

Posted on Saturday, 2002 May 25 by Anton

Charles Murtaugh quotes from the NY Times obituary an interesting sentence from Stephen Jay Gould (apparently in 1982 when he first had cancer):

“When my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way,” he wrote. However, “death is the ultimate enemy – and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.”

What a contrast to the mystical morality of Star Trek, in which death is a duty to posterity and progress – the progress that Gould (like Dawkins) denies so often. Continue reading →

Posted in futures | 1 Comment

sovereignty ≠ liberty

Posted on Friday, 2002 May 24 by Anton

USS Clueless defends American unilateralism again:

[quoting a British paper] “a disdain for any treaty that might, even marginally, tie the administration’s hands”. We in the US refer to that as “liberty”. I know it’s a foreign notion in Europe, but we actually fought a revolution to get it, and we’d like to keep it. We think it’s pretty damned important.

No, that’s sovereignty, not the same thing at all; though Steve is right in saying our ancestors fought a war for it (when they already had considerable liberty). Liberty, on the other hand, is defended precisely by tying the administration’s hands – or so Americans once used to say.

(While I’m up, democracy is also not the same thing as either liberty or sovereignty.)

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my kinda governor

Posted on Friday, 2002 May 24 by Anton

Jesse Ventura (according to Rich Hailey) opposes mandating the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, for exactly the right reasons; looks like his libertarian streak is wider than I thought.

2010: newer link

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it strikes me as more Barbara Cartland

Posted on Thursday, 2002 May 23 by Anton

Pink Hello Kitty Laptop. (Thanks to Spastic Mutant for the link.)

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penguin problems

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 May 22 by Anton

Yesterday my Linux box crashed and I spent all evening trying to bring it back to life, with – as they say at NASA – partial success. Argh.

Later: In desperation, I tried ^C when the boot process says “/1 contains a file system with errors, check forced.” Interrupting the check of /1 (whatever that is) lets the boot proceed normally. A temporary solution, but better than nothing.

Linux: Not Ready for Prime Time.

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