Warning: While I don’t intend for anything here to be a spoiler for the “primes and fractions” post I wrote before it (the post following this if you’re looking at the front page), it’s possible that you’d have more fun working out that brainteaser if you didn’t read this post first.
At the time when I [...]
I was nosing around my home directory, and ran into a file with the following contents:
From The Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 3, number 1, p. 45.
Problem is by J. H. Conway.
Problem 2.4:
A Prime Problem for the Ambidextrous
17/91, 78/85, 19/51, 23/38, 29/33, 77/29, 95/23, 77/19, 1/17, 11/13, 13/11, 15/14, 15/2, 55/1.
Write down 2 (with your right hand). [...]
Recently, we’ve been watching some videos on our TV via our Mac, using an appropriate video adapter and Front Row. Which works pretty well; I don’t plan to make a habit of it, but it’s nice to know that the option is available for the times when I want it.
Actually, I take that back: [...]
I still haven’t figured out Cursor*10, but it has some neat ideas. (Via GayGamer.)
An ActiveRecord tutorial; a nice little introduction to the concepts, I liked the way they get their hands dirty with showing you the SQL.
Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about Obama…
For no particular reason, a random bit of Sesame [...]
I have rarely been so proud of my alta mater as when I learned that they (or at least Arts and Sciences) adopted a rule requiring faculty members to make their research be freely and openly available. I have no idea why academic presses didn’t start crumbling five or ten years ago; open access [...]
I’ve linked to Hans Rosling before, but his 2007 TED talk makes him worth a second mention:
A good speaker, with some very interesting facts to present and ways to present them, and make sure you stay for the surprise ending! (A warning, it’s 19 minutes long.)
Found via Presentation Zen, who also links to several [...]
I’ve been in a state of disillusioned disconnect about presidential elections for the last 15 years or so. (I was excited about Bill Clinton; that lasted until he made a 180 degree turn on his campaign promises within days of being elected.) To some extent, I was wrong about that: I underestimated George [...]
I’ve been tinkering with my GTD system in the two weeks since I first posted about it; I’m quite pleased with the system, and wanted to talk a bit about how it’s going and the changes.
First: I really am getting things done. Simple things that should get taken care of immediately are, in fact, [...]
A year or two ago, my brother gave me a copy of the Getting Things Done book. I won’t go into the details here (partly because it’s been more than a year since I read the book, so I don’t remember the details!), but it’s basically a system for organizing tasks in such a [...]
About two and a half months ago, I had 89 saved items in my feed reader. I noted that I wasn’t shrinking that number as quickly as I expected, and predicted that, two months later, I’d have shrunk the list by a further 20 items. It’s a more than two later; how am [...]
Pretty sand pictures:
(Via Backreaction, which has links to more.)
Those are some big crystals.
Van Jacobson on networking. More than an hour long, which is why it took me more than a year to get around to watching it, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here.
You’re probably already all aware of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to [...]
Liesl’s dad gave her a set of Get Smart DVDs for christmas. Miranda thinks that they are absolutely hilarious. (I won’t disagree.)
Beautiful libraries. (I think I linked to a similar gallery before, but this one’s better.)
From Pink Tentacle: the chopsticks bra and two bathroom-related entries.
Remarkable underground temples. (Via tecosystems.)
If video game systems start doing head-tracking, watch out:
(Via Games Are Art 2.0; the good stuff starts at around 2:30.)
A fun word-association game. (Via Mark [...]
Near the start of the year, I ran into an article claiming that, by slowing down in advance of traffic jams, a single driver could break up the jams, and that in particular you could turn merge congestion into smoothly flowing traffic.
Clearly, this demanded further experimentation. So I gave it a try: when I [...]
Miranda had her first German lesson today. Which has taken me quite some time to arrange: while I’m reasonably good at getting around to trivialities, I’m not always so great at doing actual important stuff. So we’d been planning to get her foreign language lessons for a couple of years, but I hadn’t [...]
Sun gives us the week from Christmas to New Year’s as a holiday; this year, those days fall on Tuesdays, and they’re giving us Christmas Eve as well. And we’re not going anywhere over Christmas, nor is anybody visiting us.
This means that I have eleven solid days at home with no demands on my [...]
Over the months of reading server usage states for the blog, I have noticed that many of the search results that bring people here include the word “bianca”. Hmm, I thought, I didn’t recall writing about “bianca red latex”. Is Bianca some character in a video game that I wrote about but have [...]
It looks like the Warriors are going to be more entertaining than the A’s this year; maybe I should change my TV-watching habits? Starting the season 0-6 was not so great, but getting back to a .500 record a mere 8 games later was quite impressive, and they’re now 11-8 after a very good [...]
I would seem to be more confused than normal these days. Which, in the past, has frequently been a good sign; maybe my brain is figuring something out? Or maybe I’m just clueless. Anyways, I present to you a random collection of thoughts, which may or may not be related to [...]
Watching Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk was an excellent use of 19 minutes of my time; if you don’t know the examples (both historical and present day) that have motivated his recent work, you’re missing something.
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