At some point in our early math education, we’re told that anything to the power of zero evaluates to one. 1°=1 and 5°=1 and 99°=1. Basically, x°=1 for all x. It’s typically presented as just a rule about taking anything to the power of zero, but it’s actually derived from a more basic rule about exponents.
Thinking about x° in connection with something else recently, it occurred to me there’s a second way to justify the notion that anything to the power of zero is one.
It also occurred to me 0ⁿ might be an implementation of the Dirac delta.
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2 Comments | tags: Dirac delta, exponentiation, group theory, multiplication, Paul Dirac, zero | posted in Math
Last month when I published the Blog Anniversary post I lamented how yet another WordPress “update” had made it harder for me to copy the monthly post hit stats to my SelectedPosts database so I could make charts. The new table widget doesn’t allow selecting and copying [big frown].
Turns out my browser can be cajoled into making a screen grab that successfully interprets the image as a table with text, so it’s possible to capture the data, but looks to be a royal PITA, so it may be that the monthly hit stat ship has sailed.
But then I realized I had yearly hit stat data readily available.
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5 Comments | tags: Anniversary, blog, blogger, blogging, July 4 | posted in Life, Writing
Last Saturday, thanks to Amazon Prime, I screened a theme-related science fiction double-feature: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) and Arrival (2016). Both are fairly recent films about aliens visiting the Earth on mysterious missions.
The former, of course, is a remake of the 1951 same-named classic — a film good enough to have stood the test of time. Which, for science fiction films, is saying something. The remake suffers in comparison (and because it’s a remake) but considered on its own is an okay SF movie.
Arrival is generally a better film, but I do have a few issues with it.
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15 Comments | tags: adaptations, Arrival (film), Denis Villeneuve, Keanu Reeves, remakes, science fiction, science fiction movies, SF Movies, The Day the Earth Stood Still | posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Saturday
It has been almost four weeks since my last blog post. I decided to take something of a vacation to celebrate various anniversaries (the blog, 12 years; retirement, 10 years; buying this condo, 20 years). And to celebrate finally getting some long-standing tasks off my TODO list (such as finally making a will).
Being retired puts a new spin on vacations, though. Being retired is vacation: your hard-earned, well-deserved permanent vacation. How does one take a vacation from a vacation?
Regardless, today is the last chance for a July edition of Friday Notes, so vacation-vacation is over, and it’s back to just being on vacation.
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8 Comments | tags: Batman, blogging, dreams, Fermi Paradox, Gotham City, idealism, realism | posted in Friday Notes
It’s that time again, my blog anniversary. It’s been twelve years, more than 1300 posts (plus a few dozen pages), and almost two million words (1.7 and change). That’s a fair amount of water over the dam. That said, the river flows a bit slower these days.
This 12-year anniversary comes on the heels of the 10-year anniversary of being retired. While the perceived importance of tens is a very human conceit (you’d expect the Simpsons and Mickey Mouse to attach that same importance to eights), twelves have a nice mathematical importance — there are more ways to evenly divide it: 2, 3, 4, and 6 (compared to the 2 and 5 of tens or the 2 and 4 of eights).
(That nice divisibility is handy with our 12-hour clocks and 12-month years.)
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9 Comments | tags: Anniversary, blog, blogger, blogging, July 4 | posted in Life, Writing
Today marks the ten-year anniversary of walking out of work for the last time. When I did, I thought I’d return for the occasional visit to see how old friends were doing. The reality is that I haven’t been anywhere near the place since. I’m glad to have at long last shed my corporate cloak, glad to have finally escaped.
I’ve very much enjoyed being retired. Finding something to do has never been a problem for me. Quite to the contrary, I’m delighted to have all the time to pursue my hobbies and interests.
And it’s done wonders for my overall mood and outlook on life. I’m a much happier person being out of the “rat race”.
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14 Comments | tags: corporations, retirement, The Company, work | posted in Life
There is an old saying about how one’s eyes are sometimes bigger than one’s stomach — something I have to watch out for when visiting a buffet. I think, too, that my imagination sometimes is bigger than my will.
So many thoughts that seem like good ideas but don’t ever go anywhere substantial. Or, perhaps more honestly, I lack the will to put in the effort required. Since I retired, I’ve gotten pretty lazy and self-indulgent.
These Friday Notes posts have been very helpful in reducing my collection of notes, so here we go again with a bunch of random little thoughts.
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5 Comments | tags: Big Blatant Lie, diet mountain dew, MWI, President Obama, the multiverse | posted in Friday Notes
Back in March I posted about the Japanese media franchise Lupin the Third. The main character is the grandson of the fictional thief Arsène Lupin from the stories by French author Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941). Last month, I posted about a Japanese live-action series that isn’t connected with the franchise and only implies the fictional French thief.
For TV Tuesday this month, I’m posting about the French standalone live-action series Lupin. Here the references are explicit. When he was young, the main character fell in love with the stories of Leblanc and based his own life (as a thief) on the fictional Arsène Lupin.
And, as usual lately, I’ll mention some movies I watched on television.
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4 Comments | tags: Donnie Yen, French TV shows, Ip Man, Lupin (TV series), Lupin the Third, Sammo Hung, thieves | posted in Movies, TV Tuesday
A badly slanted worldview.
There is a disease of the mind, an awful meme, usually passed from parent to child, that sees a person’s paint job as an all-defining aspect of their personality. This disease blinds the mind’s eye, disabling it from seeing past the color of someone’s skin.
Historically this disease has been one of the great sources of human evil. It’s bestial, a hearkening back to the primitive animal reactions of the perceived other. Tragically, the same minds that rise us so far up give us tremendous power to conceive hate, evil, and destruction.
At its worst, this disease — racism — leads to casual murder of human beings.
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5 Comments | tags: Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Juneteenth, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin | posted in Opinion, Politics, Society
I posted a while back about the summer fishing/camping trip to the “secret” middle-of-the-wilderness lake my buddy “Scott” (we’ll call him) and I took each year — along with anyone we could talk into joining us. It was our annual pilgrimage for almost two decades.
Three times during that era we vacationed somewhere else: a cabin on Lake Kabetogama (where I caught zero fish); a houseboat on Lake Vermilion (loved sleeping on the water); and that time on the Churchill River in northern Saskatchewan.
We were so far north we were under the Northern Lights.
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16 Comments | tags: camping, Canada, fishing, Saskatchewan | posted in Life
Logos con carne 