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.
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.
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
Friday I happened to pass a bookstore (believe it or not!) and found A Gateway to Sindarin by David Salo. It’s a few years old now; I wonder how I missed it.
After overviews of the history and writing systems, there’s a list of 248 sound-shifts from proto-Elvish to Common Eldarin to Lindarin (Telerin) to Old Sindarin to Middle Sindarin to Classical Sindarin to the Third Age and various dialects. Wow. The accedence paradigms are surprisingly complete, though Salo remarks that no second-person verb endings are attested (he used a reasonable analogy to invent them).
Criticisms: Breaking up the word list into common words and three lists of proper nouns (echoing the index to LotR) is a strange choice. I would like to see some discussion of Salo’s methodology.
— My handle on Wikipedia and a few other places is Tamfang, intended to mean copper beard. The first root is attested only (so far as I know) in an early version of The Chaining of Melko. The canonical words for copper (according to Salo) are urun (metal) and rust (color), but these don’t appeal to me; so I postulate that a form related to tambe survived in some language east of the Misty Mountains.
I had forgotten, until Mike Linksvayer reminded me, that Users must be registered and logged in to comment was switched on. Akismet seems to do a good job of catching spam, so I’ve turned off the registration requirement.
Can’t sleep.
I’ll probably delete this post later, but meanwhile — If anyone is still reading this pathetic drivel, do me a favor and let me know.
I don’t know for sure that such attention would help this mood any, but it can’t hurt.
Heard on KDFC:
Don’t miss this critically acclaimed production that epitomizes the pure classicism that defined the romantic ballets.
Er, isn’t Romanticism generally distinguished from “pure classicism”?