Friday  28 Feb 2014           comment?

The use of custom fonts on web pages means that font code gets widely distributed. A number of typefaces I've seen (and liked) for decades in print are now disseminated in digital form by the web sites of the magazines/newspapers in question, albeit protected by license. But the code is out there; as Donald Knuth (a pioneer of digital typography) once put it,

I don't know how you're going to keep those numbers a secret.

WOFF is a popular format for delivering fonts for use in web pages. It may be that the main motivation for WOFF wasn't technical but rather to make web fonts just a little harder to use for other purposes. (This isn't the first time that proprietary interest has caused proliferation of font formats. TrueType was created because Adobe was keeping a tight hold on PostScript Type 1.)

Knuth had an interesting comment on the economics of fonts:

Scientists are supported by the National Science Foundation to discover science, which benefits the human race. Artists, or font designers, are not supported by the National Font Foundation to develop fonts that are going to be beneficial to the human race. Fonts are beneficial to the human race, they just don't traditionally get supported that way. I don't know why. They're both important aspects of our life. It's just that one part has traditionally gotten funded by a royalty type mechanism and the other by public welfare grants for the whole country.

Wednesday  26 Feb 2014           comment?

Arizona has been in the news this week, culminating today with Governor Jan Brewer's veto of SB 1062. Der Spiegel put it bluntly with the headline Arizonas Gouverneurin stoppt Steinzeit-Gesetz gegen Schwule (Arizona's governor stops Stone Age law against gays).

Although the bill got attention for its relevance to discrimination against gay people, it's nominally about religious freedom. It was, of course, the work of Republicans—who like to bring up religion, especially when it lets them avoid mentioning homosexuality.

Assertion of religious belief can be the magic words that compel deference in the USA. If you were drafted during the Vietnam war and applied for conscientious objector status, you would be interviewed by a draft board. If you said you'd thought long and hard and had your own principled reasons why you objected to being a soldier, you could expect to be questioned further. But if you said "I was raised a Quaker" you'd get conscientious objector status with no questions asked.

SB 1062 would've said: to discriminate, just wave the flag of religion.

Saturday  22 Feb 2014           comment?

(i.e., 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ...)

can be manipulated to have a finite sum, to wit: -1/12, a result that seems more than a little preposterous.

I've gotten used to counterintuitive results when infinities are involved but this is truly off the wall. I don't know quite what to make of it.

I can follow various methods that yield this -1/12 sum but I'm not in a position to comment on how meaningful or rigorous they are. I am disinclined to pronounce them worthless for several reasons, not least of which is that they seem to have practical applications in physics. I refer interested readers to the equation's Wikipedia page.

There is precedent for practical mathematics that lacked rigor when first devised. Leibniz did calculus by means of infinitesimals—numbers smaller than any positive real but larger than zero—a concept with no solid definition that struck quite a few people as preposterous. It wasn't until the 1960s (!) that infinitesimals were put on a sound footing.

Infinitesimals aren't the only way to formalize calculus. Epsilon-delta limits were made rigorous first, but that took a while too (roughly 150 years after Newton and Leibniz).

Friday  14 Feb 2014           comment?

Road sign in Nevada, embellished (no, I didn't do it) with stick‑on eye. N.B. Desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) is the state reptile for both CA and NV.

Coyotes in Panamint Valley around sundown today. See also a 19‑second video of these two guys.

New twr under construction at LAS. See also last year's pic at an earlier stage.

Thursday  13 Feb 2014           comment?

heterochromia iridum.

Whether David Bowie's eyes exhibit true heterochromia is disputed.
As Wikipedia so aptly puts it:

Bowie's status is ambiguous.

Wednesday  12 Feb 2014           comment?

Tuesday  11 Feb 2014           comment?

Monday  10 Feb 2014           comment?

As cities go, I'm partial to port cities
not just because of the cosmopolitan culture that arises around ports
but also because I dig the big bridges that get built near harbors.

NY and SF both have serious bridge action.

Sunday  09 Feb 2014           1 comment

Saguaros with winter clothes on. Las Vegas airport (yesterday).

But I am an animal.

Friday  07 Feb 2014           comment?

OK. I've heard that Russians who are critical of Putin are subject to intimidation, but I didn't know that it might come in the form of a massive wooden penis chained to your car, as happened to political satirists Arseny Bobrovsky and Katya Romanovskaya last week. Nor did I know that a 2008 speech by Garry Kasparov was interrupted by a radio controlled flying penis. This stuff would seem preposterous in a work of fiction. And as long as we're on the subject of Russia, I like this collection of pics of "accomodations" in Sochi.