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

hubris

Posted on Friday, 2006 April 28 by Anton

On June 29, 2005, a redesigned Freedom Tower was released, addressing security concerns raised about the original design. The new design retains essential elements of the original — soaring 1,776 feet into the sky, its illuminated spire evoking the Statue of Liberty’s torch — but features a larger, cubic base set back further from West Street to protect the building against any future terrorist attempts.

Because, y’know, what really had me worried was that the bad guys might bring this one down with a truck-bomb, just like its predecessor.

Posted in general | Leave a comment

do you speak Polish?

Posted on Friday, 2006 April 28 by Anton

One of my images is being used as a background on Allegro, which looks like a Polish cousin of eBay. It would please me if someone were to tell the seller that I’m a bit peeved.

One of these days I’ll make an image containing the text IF YOU USE MY WORK WITHOUT EVEN TELLING ME, YOU CAN AT LEAST HOST IT YOURSELF, and substitute it for any images requested from such sites.

Posted in general | 1 Comment