I had an unusually acute attack of despair this morning, likely aggravated by sleeping poorly. It was a bit of a struggle to drag myself out the door.
Another disadvantage of driving to work is that it offers too little distraction. I miss being able to read or nap on BART.
I’ve been catching up on Heroes (the link is to the first episode on NBC’s website). Episode 18 “Parasite” has an establishing shot of Las Vegas, an aerial view in daylight, which I did not recognize because establishing shots of Las Vegas are traditionally street-level and nocturnal, emphasizing the blinkenlights. (Though if the shot were longer I might guess it from the eccentric architecture and the distant mountains.) I knew it was Vegas because Hiro, last seen there, was in the next shot. I wonder what fraction of the viewers were as clueless as I was.
(by Glenn Gould)
2016: The embedding doesn’t work anymore, presumably because it used Flash; so here’s a link.
Nearly eight hours in the making, here it is: all the 24-bit colors in a tasteful, tilable fractal arrangement — 16million.png.gz (1 megabyte). And since Mads asked for it, the Python sourcecode: two files.
Another way to flatten the color cube is by traversing both the cube and the square with Hilbert curves, and continuously mapping one to the other. I’ll try that, one of these weeks.
spam title of the day: geosynchronous pickup truck
The first letter in this week’s Economist is from Nikolai Wenzel, assistant professor of economics at Hillsdale College, who says in part:
. . . as of 2004 only 55% of America’s health spending was private . . . . this 45% does not capture the so-called “Cadillac effect” that comes from the American Medical Association’s guild-like stranglehold on providing medical services, the distortion from the tax treatment of certain health and insurance expenses, and many other unseen costs of government regulation and subsidies.
I am fond of observing that my ideological opponents, whenever they want to gloat about the inadequacies of the private sector, invariably point to the most heavily subsidized and regulated industry of all; illustrating Hayek’s law that intervention creates distortion which provokes clamor for more intervention.
I got a spam for Viagra entitled unseemly nation, and 4 minutes later a Korean spam entitled RE: unseemly tomato.
