Is ‘Iterating Grace’ re-iterating ‘Milwaukee’?

Posted on June 22, 2015 by otinokyad

Consider an evening in New York City in late September 2013. Two men and a woman are in the Brooklyn apartment of one of the men, or more likely in her pied-à-terre in Manhattan. Or perhaps nowhere, since I am hypothesizing about this gathering, not recounting. They are reviewing the events of the day, which saw the culmination of a project that the men had begun five years before and of which the woman had learned only a little less than a year earlier. Her subsequent role had been solely as observer and recorder of events, until this morning, when she became a minor participant as well.

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Ducking out on bitly

Posted on April 10, 2015 by otinokyad

When I wrote my first three posts on bitly (as “bit.ly”) nearly five years ago, they offered a serious-yet-humorous attempt to answer a simple question: Given that bitly’s shortened URLs were only 6-character strings and given the effort by 301Works (through the Internet Archive) to preserve those “mappings,” how long would it be before bitly ran out of strings? My assumption-dependent answer back then — roughly the year 2030 — is now as irrelevant as 301Works seems to be invisible, but you can find the third post here with backlinks to the first two: “Soooo big!” Counting on bit.ly, Part III.

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“Would you like melatonin with those?…”

Posted on April 8, 2015 by otinokyad

Four years ago this summer, as part of deciding to have cataract surgery, I read a lot about eye health and function. Coincidentally, I also read a story in the Sports section of The New York Times: ‘Hitters With Blue Eyes Are Wary About Glare’. Who knew that people with blue eyes, of whom I am one, are more susceptible to glare and brightness than those with dark eyes? Not me, although I then immediately understood why I always needed to wear sunglasses, even on days or at a time of day when almost no one else was doing so.

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Randall Munroe buys a house (or not)

Posted on February 1, 2015 by otinokyad

sheep_TRP_comm Consider this question: How can a cartoon drawn by a physicist in Massachusetts impact the housing market in the Lake District of southern Chile? If you thought, oh, that sounds like one of those T. Rowe Price commercials that proclaim, “We understand the connections of a complex global economy,” that’s exactly what I intended… when I wrote it.

In the case of those five commercials, however, the opening is a teaser, for example, “How can power consumption in China impact wool exports from New Zealand, textile production in Spain, and the use of medical technology in the US?” The economic secret behind each combination goes unstated, but presumably if you become a T. Rowe Price customer, you will get the decoder ring, or a white paper, that will make it all clear.

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