easy diagnosis

Posted on Wednesday, 2006 May 10 by Anton

Google Mail does a good job of catching spam, but a mediocre job of flagging “phishing” fraud within the spam trap. One very simple clue: if it contains

<a href=”http://scamhost.ru/paypal/”>http://www.paypal.com/</a>

it’s not likely to be kosher.

Posted in spam | Leave a comment

King Numbers

Posted on Wednesday, 2006 May 10 by Anton

You may have heard me advocate abolition of the US judiciary, as a way to restore some of the tension between Federal and State authorities that Publius considered so important.

Failing that, I’ve also proposed to eliminate the “jackpot” effect by allowing each President to nominate a fixed number of Supreme Court Justices per term, irrespective of vacancies. It turns out that one appointment per Congress would be about right: the present Congress is the 109th, and 110 persons so far have sat on that bench. (Followup)

Posted in constitution | 3 Comments

moods

Posted on Monday, 2006 May 08 by Anton

When the FDA banned tryptophan in 1990, it did not get around to restricting tryptophan’s metabolite 5-hydroxy-tryptophan. Since learning that a few weeks ago, I’ve been experimentally taking it; it seems to give my mood a floor. Today, though, I had my first spontaneous despair episode in some time. At least it was brief.

Posted in bitterness | Leave a comment

nothing’s perfect

Posted on Sunday, 2006 May 07 by Anton

Since moving back to MacOS from Red Hat, I do miss a few features:

  • ability to resize a window by dragging any edge, not only the bottom right corner
  • ability to send the current window to the back with a single stroke (a feature of the Sawfish window manager)
  • gftp, a good ftp client
Posted in neep-neep | 2 Comments

when grown-ups play with blocks

Posted on Sunday, 2006 May 07 by Anton

I’ve redone the Wikipedia page on convex uniform tilings of Euclidean 3-space.

It occurs to me that one could enumerate the convex uniform tilings of flat, spherical and hyperbolic 3-spaces by an approach similar to what I’ve used to find fullerenes. First make a list of the vertex figures of convex uniform polyhedra: these are polygons which share the property that their corners lie on a circle. Then use a spiral search to build irregular polyhedra from these polygons. Whenever such a polyhedron’s vertices all lie on a sphere, you have the vertex figure of a candidate solution (some of which will fail for other reasons). The size of the sphere tells you whether and which way the relevant space is curved.

Has this been done?

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | Leave a comment

wandering the web

Posted on Saturday, 2006 May 06 by Anton

Gunnerkrigg Court, a newish cartoon-strip set in a decidedly weird boarding school.

This is too good to leave buried in the comments: Loituma perform “Ievan polkka”

Sheldon Richman: Capitalism vs Capitalism

Something Positive: It’s entirely possible that you’ll appreciate this joke more than I can.

You don’t need me to tell you that MC Escher laid down some killer grooves. It’s high time someone made a movie of his last work: Snakes on a plane!

Posted in arts, cartoons, economics, music+verse | 1 Comment

how’s your German?

Posted on Saturday, 2006 April 29 by Anton

I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes are quite what I’m after, and I think it may miss some solutions.)

Would I pay for a translation? Well, I’m obscenely broke these days, but I might.

Posted in language, mathematics, neep-neep | 3 Comments