battling ampersands

Posted on Sunday, 2008 December 28 by Anton

Abercrombie & Kent, a travel agency that uses a Times Roman ampersand as a trademark, sued andBEYOND, a travel agency, not for the tacky capitalization but for using a Gill Sans ampersand as a trademark.

I doubt that such a suit would succeed if the marks in question were very different graphic treatments of the same letter, say an angular S forming a thunderbolt versus a more stolid sort of S in a ring. How different would the newcomer’s mark need to be, and is the necessary difference greater for quasi-letters such as ampersand?

Posted in arts, heraldry | 1 Comment

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut with a straight face

Posted on Sunday, 2008 December 28 by Anton

Someone considered this passage, in “The Night of the Legion of Death” (an episode of The Wild Wild West), worth quoting on IMDb:

You’re not the Governor. Your one of the down faith, commandor present, your value silver voice! Your a howl chain faint fraud Brubaker! I am the Governor, I made you, I put you in office, I create your faint legion, I writing speech for you, tell you what to said, what to think, what to reach for, who to reward or execute your greek mass! It’s I speak proof and don’t ever forget that.

Ya gotta wonder about the person who transcribed this: did they think it made sense, or find it an admirable piece of nonsense?

Well, I hope I improved it some:

You’re not the Governor. You’re a wonderfully endowed face, a commanding presence, a bell-like silver voice. You’re a hollow tin-plated fraud, Brubaker! I am the Governor. I made you. I put you into office. I created your Black Legion. I write your speeches for you, tell you what to say, what to think, what to reach for, who to reward, who to execute. You’re a Greek mask that I speak through. Don’t ever forget that.

Posted in cinema, language | Leave a comment

back in time

Posted on Sunday, 2008 December 28 by Anton

I wrecked my blog in trying to cure a Unicode display problem, and restored the site from a backup of December 11. A few posts and comments were lost.

Posted in me!me!me! | Leave a comment

a modest condition

Posted on Wednesday, 2008 December 10 by Anton

When we are called upon to pay the debts of a corporation because it is “too big to fail”, shouldn’t the beneficiary at least be required to break up into pieces small enough to fail?

Posted in politics | Leave a comment

Hilbert’s palette

Posted on Wednesday, 2008 December 03 by Anton

A space-filling path through this square is matched to an analogous path through the color-cube.

I had this idea in mind for years but the algorithm for Hilbert’s curve defeated me; then I stumbled on Steve Witham’s Python code, and whipped up this doodle in half an hour.

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | 4 Comments

Incandescence

Posted on Tuesday, 2008 December 02 by Anton

In Greg Egan’s latest novel, as is not uncommon in first contact novels, the chapters alternate between the viewpoints of a human explorer and a member of the newly discovered species. In defiance of convention, Rakesh never finds Roi’s world. (There is room for a sequel, but I don’t expect one.) Roi lives in a tiny artificial world orbiting a black hole, and Rakesh finds a similar world orbiting a neutron star.

So why is Roi in the book? Because she is a leader in the blossoming of science in her world – going from pretechnological ignorance to general relativity in one lifetime, thanks to the peculiar environment – while the world contacted by Rakesh is stagnant.

Posted in prose | 1 Comment

chaos and health

Posted on Sunday, 2008 November 16 by Anton

In a private forum, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:

I remember that one of my early epiphanies on the road to libertarianism came when I was reading about chaotic, scale-independent oscillations in heartbeat frequency. One might naively think that the healthier the heart, the more regular its beat – but actually the opposite is true. A healthy heart chaotically wanders around a setpoint, as a result of interactions of millions of locally coupled oscillators, the spontaneously spiking cells in the AV node. But as you press your heart harder and harder, as in heart failure, the chaotic rhythms are becoming simpler, until one last AV frequency remains, usually quite high, tachycardic, produced by an ever smaller set of cells. The next step may be fibrillation, or asystole, and death.

So, in our hearts health comes from chaos, the absence of a rhythm for every cell to dance by. Networked interactions can be made much more robust using multiple, locally interacting oscillators, rather than relying on a single one. The analogies to the society, the share of activities controlled by a single global decision-maker versus multiple local ones are in my mind crystal clear.

Posted in economics, medicine | Leave a comment