it’s been fun. well, sometimes.

Posted on Wednesday, 2009 February 25 by Anton

The domain ogre.nu expires next month, and I’m wondering how many people will notice if I let it go.

Posted in me!me!me! | 6 Comments

what could be simpler?

Posted on Wednesday, 2009 February 25 by Anton

I got yet another wacky idea for a Martian calendar. Start with 24 months of 28 days each. Drop one day from every seventh month (so that a given month is short in one year out of seven), and add one day every 48 years. The result is longer than the mean tropical year by one day in 6176 years.

An analogous calendar for Earth: start with 12 months of 30 days, add 3 days to every 7 months (so the cycle is 30 30 31 30 31 30 31), and add one day every ten years; this is long by one day in 219130 years.

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one with everything

Posted on Wednesday, 2009 February 11 by Anton

Does Professor Carr, for example, realize, when he asserts that “we can no longer find much meaning in the distinction familiar to nineteenth-century thought between ‘society’ and ‘state,’” that this is precisely the doctrine of Professor Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi theoretician of totalitarianism and, in fact, the essence of the definition of totalitarianism which that author has given to that term which he himself had introduced?

F. A. Hayek: The Road to Serfdom (1944), chapter XIII: “The Totalitarians in Our Midst”

You cannot say you love your country and hate your government.

Bill Clinton, 1995 (possibly misquoted)

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suggestion box

Posted on Sunday, 2009 January 25 by Anton

I’ve been out of work since September. I may yet be reinstated (the decision-maker has been stalling since November), but supposing otherwise, I need advice.

My one known marketable skill is wordprocessing, which will eventually be obsolete as voice recognition improves (or more people do their own typing). It has been suggested that I try telephone tech support; but the suggestion did not come from someone with any idea how to seek such a job. Other ideas?

It seems not unlikely that the San Francisco Bay has an excess of people like me, while some other place (perhaps with cheaper housing) has a deficit. Where might that place be?

Some years ago I took a Unix admin course; insomnia and a series of colds (it was a chilly November) conspired to prevent my absorbing anything. I might try again. My One True Ex thinks I ought to learn accounting. What other skills might I acquire in less than a year?

Posted in me!me!me! | 4 Comments

ten times as ineffable

Posted on Thursday, 2009 January 22 by Anton

We’re miffed that our favorite catfood, Fancy Feast, has apparently changed its formula: both Fluffie and Pillow, who formerly ate it eagerly, now turn up their noses. To our relief, they’re usually content with Trader Joe’s tuna.

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circles in ellipses

Posted on Thursday, 2009 January 08 by Anton

Many people have worked on the problem of packing equal circles efficiently in various regular shapes. David Cantrell asks, what is the ellipse of least area that can enclose n unit circles? Sometimes it’s a circle (n=1,7,19), sometimes it’s highly eccentric (n=23). Several of the results are rather pretty.

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time and capacity

Posted on Sunday, 2008 December 28 by Anton

Malcolm Gladwell writes in his new book:

. . . excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – which surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

Does anyone else find it suspicious that the magic number does not depend on the field? Perhaps it does not measure the amount of study necessary for expertise, whatever that is, but a point beyond which improvement is much more difficult because a brain’s capacity is finite, which then becomes our definition of expertise.

Posted in psychology | 2 Comments