Insta-Reich

Tonematrix by André Michelle is a function defined on the two-dimensional vector space over the field . And yet, it’s so much more; though self-explanatory, it might save you three seconds to know that the axes correspond to time and pitch, with the latter staggered non-linearly to prevent dissonance. It seems possible that Tokyo / [...]

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Galaxy surveys in a periodic geometry

Have just had a nice week working at Mount Stromlo Observatory and am looking forward to the coming week in Melbourne (generally) and Swinburne (particularly). Yesterday and the day before I was working on a small problem that grew out of a larger project (which I’m sure I’ll return to at a later date, just [...]

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Returning to Edinburgh

A profitable visit to MPE and a pleasant time in Munich behind me, I have an exciting week of idea refinement ahead. Of course it is nice to be back in Edinburgh, and the city was doing its best today to look bright in the fewer hours of daylight. One snapshot from the journey home [...]

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Statistics of triangulated point distributions

So this morning was unusual not in my having an interesting idea, but in pursuing it. This idea, not likely to be wholly or even partly original—I don’t want to search through journal articles only to disappoint myself just yet, & wouldn’t know where to look anyway—is about the clustering of points.

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In which I do not agree, for now.

In his sardonically-titled First Person Plural, Paul Bloom (h/t Sullivan) draws my attention to an interesting current in applied identity metaphysics (a.k.a. psychology):
But what’s more exciting, I think, is the emergence of a different perspective on happiness itself. We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had [...]

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“These aren’t crackpots arguing against the Big Bang…”

Sean Carroll provides a dégustation of recent literature on expanding space, including one work from the proprietors of this blog; the post seems to have been provoked by this recent diatribe on the subject. I am hopeful that the attention the subject is receiving might lead to it being treated as more than an issue [...]

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A Calendar Puzzle

Here’s a nice, neat puzzle for those with a spare minute.
I was at a mate’s house and saw that he had a desk calendar that worked as follows. The day of the month was displayed using two cubes, which had one number on each face. A quick calculation would suggest that the first cube (the [...]

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Rush Hour

During the recent holiday period, I was introduced to a puzzle game called ‘Rush Hour’. It’s very simple: a 6-by-6 grid is populated along rows and columns with cars and trucks; the player must manoeuvre a car to the exit by sliding the other vehicles out of the way, moving everything only either forward or [...]

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The Surprise Quiz Paradox

I love a good paradox – especially ones I can’t see a resolution to. I’ve run into this one a few times and wanted to look into it further.
The story is as follows. A teacher is worried that her class isn’t working consistently through the term, choosing instead to “cram” on the night before an [...]

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Err…. is anyone else bothered that

the Riemann hypothesis was, on Monday, (apparently) disproved?
I confess I haven’t followed the argument through its long night of lemmas, and have no intention of doing so, but if yesterday my accountant and erstwhile bookmaker had pressed me “Yo, Berian, wanna lay down some large on the RH cutting sick long term?”, I would have [...]

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