stephan.com
scattered thoughts

a fragment of a longer unpublished report
Programming languages are all predicated on the notion creating an expressive form for humans to describe complex processes both to computers and to one another. Certainly it is possible to solve any problem in any Turing-complete language with sufficient access to required resources. One need only look [...]

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was [...]

Urban legend, or true story? A new MRI machine was being installed in an unfinished building, one day from completion. The sprinklers were leaking in the MRI room, so they were turned off, but the magnet was on. A repairman walked into the room, his welding tank was sucked into the machine, it broke and set the building on fire, and it burned to the ground with no sprinklers.

A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
divided by seven
plus five times eleven
equals nine square and not more

I was just looking up minimal surfaces again for my project, and I found this lovely image of the Costa-Hoffman-Meeks Minimal Surface.
Anyway, imagine this surface, but knitted into a single piece of seamless fabric, with rings for tension at the top, bottom, and center, about 8 feet tall, suspended with wires in a gallery. [...]

Lookie what I bought! Plus a small spool (3 oz) of purple yarn to practice with.
I have no one to teach me, and I’ve been wanting to learn for almost precisely two years - I have an email from 2002, from someone I was discussing it with. Ultimately, I want to knit sculptures [...]

Whoa. Awesome pic of Saturn from the Cassini probe.

Interesting article in this month’s Scientific American (dead tree edition),
The Tyranny of Choice
Common sense suggests that having abundant options frees people to find the best route to their own happiness. But in fact, studies show that too much choice often makes for misery.
Summarizing the whole article is a pain, but there are two cool [...]

The parts for a DNA synthesizer can now be purchased for approximately $10,000. By 2010 a single person will be able to sequence or synthesize 10^10 bases a day. Within a decade a single person could sequence or synthesize all the DNA describing all the people on the planet many times over in an eight-hour [...]