Miscellanea

• aesop.html, Aesop Inside Out: a childhood misreading of one of Aesop's fables;
• altimetry.html, Altimetry or How Does the Landscape Change as an Airplane Descends?;
• anachronisms.html, Anachronisms: jarring appearances of the future in fiction about the past;
• aristotle_refuted.html, Aristotle Refuted: Socrates is not mortal, or, he couldn't be shown to be mortal, at the time, by logic;
• astronomy.html, Man's search for lifeless, waterless astronomy article;
• brain.html, a visualization of brain scan data;
• butterfly.html, the Butterfly Tempest Weather Bulletin;
• chain.html, an essay on chain letters;
• chemical_caper.tex, "The Chemical Caper", by Donald Knuth.
• chemical_caper.pdf, "The Chemical Caper", by Donald Knuth.
• circle_offcentered_surface.png, an image with the wrong name, and containing incorrect data, this mistake nonetheless has a certain surprising beauty.
• copernicus_refuted.html, Copernicus Refuted: What Does or Doesn't Go Around What?
• curses.html, a few letters of recommendation to the devil;
• the Darkbulb - "Let There Be Dark", an intriguing new consumer electronics product;
• dream_stream.html, The Dream Stream, a peculiar experience of divided consciousness.
• Can the Prosperity of Britain Continue?;
• Euler Refuted, the winner of the "Seven Bridges Road" challenge explains how he did it;
• lloyd_evolution.png, another "mistake" that has a certain beauty, this image of the evolution of a point set under Lloyd's iterative method seems to involve a caustic, a kind of focus of light rays, whereas a sequence of more or less parallel lines was expected. The difference arises simply because the initial points were not sorted.
• Fermat Refuted, nine examples of pairs of fourth powers of integers that equal the fourth power of an integer. And that's just a start.
• the Four O'Clock plant;
• The Fox's Proof, (blinded by paperwork);
• The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation;
• the Giant Brains of 1949;
• Indispensable Inventions;
• the Jim Rose Circus Side Show;
• what people say about your job;
• a mysterious sign that no one can translate;
• Measuring Paradigm Shifts on the Kuhn Scale;
• layton_review.html, a review of Bill Layton's book "Introduction to Finite Element Methods for Incompressible Viscous Flow", showing the perils of automatic language translation.
• malthus_refuted.html, Malthus Refuted: No, we're not logically doomed to starvation;
• The Curious Case of the New York Times;
• patents granted in 2006;
• Politically Correct Little Red Riding Hood,
• polly_nomial.html The Perils of Polly Nomial, a mathematical spoof by Richard Gibbs;
• Presidential Timber, a new and sensible system for measuring age and categorizing the generations;
• quotes.html, a collection of quotes;
• rogue_science.html, peculiar explanations of physical phenomena from the back of the classroom;
• Bartholomew and the RUBRIC;
• The Bride of Dr Schlockenstein;
• The Demented Delights of Dr Schlockenstein;
• the SCIgen Automatic CS Paper Generator;
• Trope A Dope, how to survive the incessant use of the meaningless word "trope";
• voronoi_maze.png, another "mistake" with a peculiar beauty. I accidentally plotted both a Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT) and a periodic CVT on the same page. Some points are in roughly the same position, and some move, but for some reason the result suggests a mazy pattern.
• Weasel Ware, how you are tricked into robbing yourself;