you know my name, look up the number

Posted on Sunday, 2002 February 10 by Anton

Peeve: Redundantly numbered lists, such as this list of 134 worst movies, numbered in alphabetical order from 1 to 102.

The median date of the champion turkeys, by the way, is 1988. Amazing.

Update (December 2003): They took the numbers off!

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soap films

Posted on Sunday, 2002 February 10 by Anton

I’ve begun to learn to use Ken Brakke’s Surface Evolver. Haven’t yet found whether it has the one feature that would make it ideal for my exploration of nonspherical ‘dome’ forms: ability to constrain the edges to equal length.

The documentation says non-orientable surfaces are allowed, but so far Evolver has not allowed me to make a Klein bottle.

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

are you threatening me?

Posted on Thursday, 2002 February 07 by Anton

Sinfest borrows a riff from Whose Line Is It Anyway?.

Posted in cartoons | 1 Comment

Grendel

Posted on Thursday, 2002 February 07 by Anton

Today I bought Devil’s Legacy, a reprint of my then favorite of Matt Wagner’s Grendel stories. The new color job and slick paper make the Pander Bros artwork even more hard-edged and vivid, unless my memory (of 1986) is what’s soft at the edges.

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bugs in spaaace!

Posted on Thursday, 2002 February 07 by Anton

This article (found at SciTech Daily) tells about tiny autonomous fliers proposed for Mars.

Bees may also provide a solution for navigating on Mars, where there is no GPS network or magnetic field to tell one pole from another. Bees use a combination of polarization patterns in the sky, landmarks, and distance traveled to navigate.

Is satellite-assisted navigation unlikely for Mars? How many birds does it take? If the flier gets even one fix a day, it can correct gross errors in dead-reckoning.

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start somewhere

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 February 06 by Anton

Everybody’s doing it.
Well, what shall I talk about first?
How about the last book I read? Yeah.

I learned roughly three things from It’s the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races by Lena Williams (Harcourt, 2000):

  • Long un-kinky blond hair is a status symbol forever out of Blacks’ reach, and some resent seeing a White gratuitously flip such hair about.
  • Because of the ‘boy’ thing, Blacks don’t take first-naming as a friendly gesture.
  • You can write for the New York Times for 25 years without learning to use the parenthetical comma properly.
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