in odd places

Posted on Thursday, 2007 December 27 by Anton

Sometimes the filler in spam is meaningful:

Developed in the 19th century through the study of the Indo-European languages, the comparative method remains the standard by which mainstream linguists judge whether two languages are related, with alternative lexicostatistical methods widely considered to be unreliable.

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Descent, in turn, is defined in terms of transmission across the generations: children learn a language from the parents’ generation and are then influenced by their peers; they then transmit it to the next generation, and so on (how and why changes are introduced is a complicated, unresolved issue). A continuous chain of speakers across the centuries links Vulgar Latin to all of its modern descendants.
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The comparative method is a method for proving relatedness in the sense just given, as well as a method for reconstructing the sound system and vocabulary of the common ancestral language and uncovering the sound changes the languages of a family have undergone.

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the view from in here

Posted on Sunday, 2007 December 16 by Anton

I suspect my new glasses have more chromatic aberration than the old. In my computer background pattern, a fractal with lots of intense colors, the red seems to stand out in front of the blue.

In unrelated news, we had a good meal at Phương Thảo in Sunnyvale.

Posted in California, food, me!me!me! | 2 Comments

non c’è più religione

Posted on Friday, 2007 November 30 by Anton

Tsk. A current radio spot gives the web address “wachovia dot com backslash new”.

Meanwhile, what’s new with me?

I’m reading Coxeter’s Non-Euclidean Geometry in the hope that it will give me the stuff I’ve sought in vain in other books: the actual formulae for coordinate transforms under the various isometries, rather than useless taunts like “a matrix with such-and-such properties” (which I don’t know how to recognize let alone generate). But it uses so many cryptic notations that I’m afraid I won’t understand the formulae if they do show up. Exercises would help. [Later: No such luck. It barely touches on H3 at all.]

My car’s starter burned itself out. Luckily this happened at home on my day off; a few hours later, all was well. My housemate pointed out that my last bit of car trouble (a dead battery) also happened at home. What a well-behaved car!

Pillow, the junior cat, has been smelling of smoke lately; and we don’t know where he’s pooping. It would seem he has found a second home, though that’s odd since he consistently flees human strangers. Perhaps he was seduced with catnip.

Posted in mathematics, me!me!me!, neep-neep, pets | 3 Comments

I suspected as much

Posted on Monday, 2007 November 19 by Anton

Roderick Long (1993): How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis: Medical Insurance that Worked – Until Government “Fixed” It

Hey, I’m a fictional character! Dr. Anton Sherwood, “an older man in a tweed suit”, appears in The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld, a novel about which I know nothing else. (I searched for my name, as one sometimes does, this time looking for ones that aren’t me.)

Posted in me!me!me!, medicine, politics | 2 Comments

still perceivin’

Posted on Thursday, 2007 November 15 by Anton

Eye exam this morning: almost no change in four years.

I mentioned that I’m thinking of surgery. Before I brought up my more specific idea of having one eye adjusted for distance and one for arm’s length, the optometrist did: apparently “monovision” surgery is not uncommon – but it’s a good idea to try it first with contacts. Wish I’d thought of that!

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sometimes there are no good possibilities

Posted on Thursday, 2007 November 08 by Anton

Years ago, in a Usenet thread about Lincoln’s unconstitutional reconquest of the South, someone asked me (I paraphrase): “As a descendant of slaves, why should I prefer to live in that alternate history where the CSA continued to keep slaves after 1865?”

I had no answer then, but one has recently occurred to me:

For several reasons I believe that slavery was more likely to end if secession was successful than if the secession had never happened. If the end of slavery were not tied to a tremendous grudge of blood and devastation, might not social equality come sooner even if formal liberation came later?

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the cake is taken

Posted on Wednesday, 2007 November 07 by Anton

I don’t suppose this is really a novelty, but it hasn’t happened to me before . . at least not recently:

I got a penis spam addressed to newyorkgirl711@pobox.com.

Come to think of it, there used to be breast-enhancing spams too, and I haven’t seen one of those in quite a while. Must not have sold well, which says something.

Posted in spam | 1 Comment