That’s a stupid idea

I’ve been listening to Chaconne by Michael and Kimberly Davenport, a recording of bass clarinet music; the title piece is an arrangement of the last movement from the Violin Partita in D minor by J. S. Bach. It’s a virtuosic showpiece (and I’m not sure it really works that well on a wind instrument, but [...]

Insane hole

Here’s a polyhedron. It has regular faces. It is nonconvex. It is crazy.

This thing can be constructed by taking one of the Johnson solids, the bilunabirotunda (or J91), cutting off two tridiminished icosahedra, and adding on two pentagonal pyramids. You’re left with the two square faces and four of the triangular faces of [...]

Regular hole

There’s a book titled Adventures Among the Toroids: a study of Quasi-Convex, Aplanar, Tunneled Orientable Polyhedra of Positive Genus having Regular Faces with Disjoint Interiors, being an elaborate Description and Instructions for the Construction of an enormous number of new and fascinating Mathematical Models of interest to Students of Euclidean Geometry and Topology, both Secondary [...]

I don’t live there any more

And that’s okay.
Of course I’m not where I live, either; I’m in Newport News, where there has been, for the past roughly 24 hours, snow on the ground. Maybe half an inch.
Unpossible!
Well, no, it did snow during the three winters we lived here. About an inch. Total. For all three combined. So not unpossible, just [...]

Synergy

I counted this morning when I parked my car at Jefferson Lab. There were about 40 cars in the near end of the parking lot I used, and of those, five (including mine) were Priuses.
Proof if proof were needed I’m driving a nerdmobile.

PREX

PREX, the Lead Radius Experiment, will use parity violating electron scattering from a Pb-208 target to determine the radius of that nucleus’s neutron distribution to 1% accuracy. In heavy nuclei, the neutrons are expected to be distributed over a slightly larger radius than the protons, but experimental evidence for this neutron “skin” is not very [...]

Champeons of Folly

We did the mumming thing again, for the sixth time since I joined the Binghamton Men (impossible though that may be to believe); it was my fourth time participating, and only the first time I’ve repeated a role — Bold Slasher, the bad guy.
It was fun.

On universes

It’s become rather fashionable lately to talk about the existence of multiple universes.
Of course the talk can get fairly contentious, especially if you don’t first agree on terms. If, for example, by “universe” you mean “everything that exists”, then your definition automatically forbids the existence of other universes. Everything that exists is in the universe, [...]

Resolve

I’ve gotten very jaded about new year’s resolutions. But why? Because they’re often earnestly made but rapidly forgotten? But that’s not the resolutions’ fault, is it?
Cynicism about self improvement is, well, perhaps evidence that one needs self improvement.
As if anyone doesn’t.
Right then.

I’m going to get into better shape. I walk a lot — I don’t [...]