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.
time flows differently in the funnies (except Gasoline Alley and For Better or For Worse)
how to argue with a libertarian (Degrees of Freedom)
arguments against state support for schools, including some that I had not encountered before
I had the idea to design a fantasy script from combinations of a small repertoire of features: namely, subsets of this set of twelve segments. Using a fixed number of segments gives some built-in error-detection. There are 924 subsets of six segments; discarding those that form disconnected graphs leaves 306, more than enough for a syllabary. (Syllabaries have been invented more often than other types of scripts, but they’re underrepresented in fantasy.) Continue reading
Amara Graps writes: “Not being a blogger, myself, I’m seeing if the bloggers I know want to pick up this story I wrote.”
What happened to Bush’s Cadillac 1?
As recorded by a viewer of the motorcade and posted to YouTube, it apparently sputtered to a stop. [The car first appears at 3:20 in this video.] It broke down, right there, on via del Tritone (near the Trevi fountain) in Rome, in the middle of the motorcade. He was ripe picking for a sharp shooter too; no wonder the police were pushing people further back, off of the street. Continue reading
