Stuff

Stuff is a collection of, well, stuff that I want to at least link to, but which doesn’t seem to quite fit under any category. It’s a catchall for stuff I don’t want to delete but also don’t have much of a place for. Think of it as my odds and ends drawer.

A couple of the items here are favorites From My Collection (a blog series I seem to have largely abandoned, although many items remain in said collection (OTOH, many of them have aged poorly, either for topicality or sensibility)). They were items I liked so much I gave them a blog page rather than a post (because posts are so ephemeral). At least one of them is timeless.

Anyway, here you go. Some stuff.

New Friends

Plato’s Divided Line A geometrical analysis of Plato’s Divided Line leading to a simple proof that the middle two segments must be equal in length. A supplement to Tina Lee Forsee’s recently released first novel, A Footnote to Plato.

Back to Plato’s Line A follow-up to the Plato’s Divided Line post with a simpler proof of the equality of the two middle segments.

Old Friends

The Code of Bushido I picked up this text somewhere along the increasingly long path that extends behind me. It might have been from a video game or movie, but the Code is real. It’s also real, if you know what I mean (in the 💯 sense).

Gibbs’ Rules If you, like me, love NCIS then you know about Leroy Gibbs and his Rules. I’ve been keeping track of them; here’s my list. It’s another Code of behavior. Now that Gibbs is off the show, it’s hard to say what will become of the Rules.

Et Cetera

From The Far Side A celebration of Gary Larson and The Far Side, a long-running comic beloved by STEM people. My most popular post each year and overall. Ironically, I’ve moved on. The only comic I follow anymore is xckd (which is kind of a distilled more technology-hip Larson).

“In Bed!” A brief piece about adding “in bed!” to the end of any fortune cookie fortune. I’ve been using the comment section to record all the fortunes I get to see if any just don’t work with the added phrase. So far they all do!

L26 and L27 A piece about extending positional notation such that you can view any text string as a number. I first encountered this idea in Mind Tools, by Rudy Rucker, but a similar idea is found in The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges.

The Lost

The interweb: IA with a low S/N A piece I wrote in the first year of this blog. I thought I’d be doing a more formal “The Interweb:” series, but I never ended up doing down that road.

One of my first posts is a companion piece, Sideband #1: Wow; the interweb is… #1, that was part of the same intended series. As it turned out, lots of my posts are about the interweb one way or another, but there’s no formal series, so these two were left hanging. (Sorry about that, guys.)

The “B” Word This is a 1990 article by Judith Stone about the word, “bitch,” a word I still don’t care much for despite its prevalent use. The text had a home on my personal website since its early incarnations in the mid-90s and was always one of the most frequently viewed pages. I gave it a home here, too, but it never got many hits. We are talking 30 years at this point.