spam title of the week

Posted on Sunday, 2006 August 13 by Anton

nun isn’t weatherproof

Posted in language, spam | Leave a comment

one, um . . .

Posted on Wednesday, 2006 August 09 by Anton

Number Systems of the World: lists of number-words from 0 to 100, ranked, somewhat arbitrarily, by “complexity”. (Cited by LanguageHat.) To me the most remarkable is Alamblak (#7) whose number-words are all compounded from the words for 1, 2, 5 and 20, thus 56 is yima hosfi tir hosfirpati rpat = twenties two, fives two-one, one.

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Jenn

Posted on Friday, 2006 August 04 by Anton

New toy! Fritz Obermeyer’s Jenn makes stereographic projections of most of the convex uniform tilings of the hypersphere; of the 64 Conway-Guy polychora only four (whose construction is somewhat anomalous) are missing.

I downloaded the generic Unix version and easily built it on my Mac.

The author has responded cheerfully to my comments.

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | 1 Comment

beauty’s where you find it

Posted on Tuesday, 2006 August 01 by Anton

I mis-heard some trivial question as “What is Hamming music?”

For some of us, the name Hamming is strongly associated with information theory, and so I imagined that “Hamming music” must be algorithmic composition using error-correcting principles.

And that got me thinking vaguely about redundancy in art.

Posted in mathematics, music+verse | Leave a comment

“An Epidemic of ‘Isolated Incidents’”

Posted on Monday, 2006 July 24 by Anton

Radley Balko has finished and published his report, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America.

Posted in drugwar | Leave a comment

the FDA must die

Posted on Saturday, 2006 July 22 by Anton

The only effective treatment for Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s narcolepsy is no longer available, thanks to the risk-averse regulatory establishment.

You know what they say: if a regulation can save just one life (in six years) — who cares how many others it wrecks?

Posted in drugwar | Leave a comment

fret globally, sweat locally

Posted on Saturday, 2006 July 22 by Anton

I took a cold shower a few minutes ago and now the water dripping in my hair is hot. Any more of this and the chemo-kids are welcome to my amber waves!

Seriously, do you know of any organization around here that collects hair for charity?

Posted in California | Leave a comment