character flaw

Posted on Sunday, 2008 April 06 by Anton

I’ve now watched three seasons of Lost, and am wondering a bit why Jack didn’t say to Ben, “Five minutes? I was a captive audience for two weeks; you could have told me then why ‘the good guys’ have been making war on us from day one. And now you want sympathy because some of your goons got hurt in yet another armed raid? I don’t owe you another breath.”

Posted in cinema | Leave a comment

ogre don’t play that

Posted on Thursday, 2008 April 03 by Anton

On the off chance that lavender_princess44, who sent two anonymous texts to my telephone just now, has some genuine chain of acquaintance with me: No, I’m not going to make an account at the site you mentioned.

Posted in general | Leave a comment

link repellent

Posted on Sunday, 2008 March 30 by Anton

I wonder whether anyone keeps track of how many times PVP has restructured its archives making old links invalid.

Posted in cartoons, neep-neep | 1 Comment

the clatter, or not, of the pins

Posted on Monday, 2008 March 24 by Anton

Saturday, at the suggestion of my new friend Jennifer Justice, I went bowling for the first time since – um – 1983?? Well, since 1997 at least.

The previous time, whenever it was, my knuckles ached. This time my hands were fine but my knees were unreliable. My last four balls were X X 0 0, for a final score of 82.

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

symmetries made simple

Posted on Tuesday, 2008 March 11 by Anton

This may be of interest to only a few: Simplest Canonical Polyhedra of Each Symmetry Type (rotable in Java); in other words, canonical forms of the simplest topologies that allow the specified symmetries and none higher. Any convex polyhedron can be deformed into a “canonical” form whose edges are all tangent to a sphere; if a polyhedron is self-dual, it is canonical.

This collection could be considered a generalization of the set of all fair dice.

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

how much is in there?

Posted on Tuesday, 2008 March 04 by Anton

I reloaded MacOS, restored my home directory from backup, and was surprised to learn that I have 3e5 files. Most of the bulk is music, but that’s only 7e3 files. Is there a tool analogous to du that gives the number of files in each directory, rather than their aggregate size? —Later: When Apple Mail imported my Thunderbird archives, it made huge numbers of files, but I don’t know yet whether they’re enough to answer the question.

In other news, the medical jargon specimen of the week:

Infant is status post a negative rule out sepsis workup . . .

I guess that means sepsis was ruled out, rather than that it was not ruled out. The weird thing is that “rule out sepsis” is often listed as a diagnosis rather than a procedure.

Posted in medicine, neep-neep | 1 Comment

happy leap day

Posted on Friday, 2008 February 29 by Anton

If I were Pope Gregory’s advisor, I’d urge this: all months to have 30 days until the first (or last) of some month falls on a solstice or equinox; thereafter, alternate 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 30, 30¼.

Unrelated link: Questioning 7/4

Posted in calendars, constitution | Tagged | 1 Comment