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October 27, 2005

"A race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality" —E. A Squared

I should really post more stuff. I've got all these links just sitting here on my screen...

The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach.
QUESTION: Thanks. Is it true that the President slapped Karl Rove upside the head a couple of years ago over the CIA leak?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Are you referring to, what, a New York Daily News report? Two things: One, we're not commenting on an ongoing investigation; two, and I would challenge the overall accuracy of that news account.

QUESTION: That's a comment.

QUESTION: Which part of it?

QUESTION: Yes, that is.

QUESTION: Which facts --

SCOTT McCLELLAN: No, I'm just saying -- no, I'm just trying to help you all.

QUESTION: So what facts are you challenging?

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Again, I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation.

QUESTION: You can't say you're challenging the facts and then not say which ones you're challenging.

SCOTT McCLELLAN: Yes, I can. I just did. (Laughter.)
"When I saw the actual sculpture, I had quite a shock," said Ocneanu. "I never imagined the play of light on the surfaces. There are subtle optical effects that you can feel but can't quite put your finger on." The sculpture has significance in several areas of mathematics related to the study of symmetry, and it can represent structures that are fundamental to many branches of mathematics and physics.

"The sculpture is a new way to represent a classical mathematical object," said Nigel Higson, head of the Penn State Department of Mathematics. "For professionals the sculpture is very rich in meaning, but it also has an aesthetic appeal that anyone can appreciate. In addition, it helps to start conversations about abstract mathematical concepts -- something that is generally hard to do with anyone other than another expert."

The subject of the projection is a regular 4-dimensional solid of intermediate complexity, which Ocneanu calls an "octacube." It has 24 vertices, 96 edges and 96 triangular faces, which enclose 24 three-dimensional "rooms." Windows cut in faces allow the viewer to see within the structure, the same way that a window in a cubic room opens to the inside of the cube. Physically, the sculpture is a giant puzzle of 96 triangular pieces cut from stainless steel and bent into spherical shape.
The persona she has crafted is strangely Pollyanna-ish and utterly absorbed in her own point of view: “I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because—I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic—it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.” In another of her bits, she invokes the events of September 11th: “They were devastating. They were beyond devastating. I don’t want to say especially for these people, or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, nine hundred calories. I had been drinking them every day. You hear soy, you think healthy. And it’s a lie.” Her constructions are minimal but the turn is sharp. “I was raped by a doctor,” she says. “Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”
The Greeks believed in an earth-centric universe and accounted for celestial bodies' motions using elaborate models based on epicycles, in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth. Mr Wright found evidence that the Antikythera mechanism would have been able to reproduce the motions of the sun and moon accurately, using an epicyclic model devised by Hipparchus, and of the planets Mercury and Venus, using an epicyclic model derived by Apollonius of Perga. (These models, which predate the mechanism, were subsequently incorporated into the work of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.)

A device that just modelled the motions of the sun, moon, Mercury and Venus does not make much sense. But if an upper layer of mechanism had been built, and lost, these extra gears could have modelled the motions of the three other planets known at the time—Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. In other words, the device may have been able to predict the positions of the known celestial bodies for any given date with a respectable degree of accuracy, using bronze pointers on a circular dial with the constellations of the zodiac running round its edge.

Mr Wright devised a putative model in which the mechanisms for each celestial body stack up like layers in a sandwich, and started building it in his workshop. The completed reconstruction, details of which appeared in an article in the Horological Journal in May, went on display this week at Technopolis, a museum in Athens. By winding a knob on the side, celestial bodies can be made to advance and retreat so that their positions on any chosen date can be determined. Mr Wright says his device could have been built using ancient tools because the ancient Greeks had saws whose teeth were cut using v-shaped files—a task that is similar to the cutting of teeth on a gear wheel. He has even made several examples by hand.
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(
I dated a Russian spy once. I didn't know she was a spy or, for that matter, Russian. She passed herself off as French Canadian by way of Germany. She worked in an insurance company here in Toronto and was, she told me, separated from her husband (who I had met). He worked at a large camera retailer in Canada (Black's).

One night around midnight I was visited by CSIS (Canadian FBI) and "interogated" about my relationship with the woman (her "name" was Laurie Lambert)--the agent refused to tell me why she was being investigated or how CSIS knew that I was "connected" to the woman (I hadn't seen her in 2 years I think).

Turns out that both her and her 'husband' were spies and that they had taken their names from dead French Canadian siblings (I found all this out later from the newspaper). At the time they were apprehended, I believe she was engaged (or at least in a serious relationship) with a Toronto-based doctor who, of course, had no idea about her real background.

So, though I don't have a definitive answer for you, in my experience spies tell no one, including those close to them, that they are spies. As the CSIS agent told me on her way out of my house, 'No one is who they claim to be. People just lie to different degrees.'
posted by dobbs at 10:45 AM PST on October 16 [!]

Okay, at least I cleared out all my serious links, and half the fun ones...

Posted by Jon Rubin at October 27, 2005 04:24 PM

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