Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

Yo, to all of those folks trying to figure out new watch designs. The clock face has been figured out. Turns out if you set the diameter of the circle of your watch face to the same length as the side length of a square that encompases the circle, then divide the square into a 6×6 grid you get a nice looking division into 12 segments. That is, where the grid crosses the circle you mark off the segments. Those 12 segments have worked pretty well for divvying up the time as us humans see it.

So anything from swatch’s internet time (not even deserving a direct a href=” link) to Nooka watches ain’t really giving the world anything beneficial. Now style, I suppose is a different question. Perhaps if you search for internet time, you will find a small cadre of users spanning the globe from Uganda to Utica, NY who measure time in a decimal system waiting for the revolution to come. But it prolly won’t. There are (2 PI radians) 360 degrees in a circle for good reason.

</rant class=’pointless’>

[edit 2005-12-16]

From themodelmakersresource.co.uk:

Another useful circle splitting procedure uses a pair of compasses to split the circle into 6:

Set the compasses to the radius of the circle. Now choose a point on the circumference and put the point of the compasses on your chosen point and mark two more points on the circumference by rotating the compasses. Now move the point to of the compasses to one of your marks and mark a further 2 points. You will notice that one of these marks is over the place where the point of the compasses was last time. Continue around the circle until you have 6 points marked around the circumference.

Joining these up splits the circle into 6. Alternatively you can just join 3 of them to the centre to split the circle into 3 and by employing the same method that you used to split 4 segments into 8 you can split 6 into 12, 24, 48, etc.

So that is different and easier and better since it is a proper construction.

Thus begins the longest wait for a CD ever. In a little over 10 months from now (Oct 1st 2006), theAgriculture will release the album: We™ “Remix We™”

Oct 1, We™ startle their public with an unexpected fourth EP of “remixes” of prior We™ hits. One of America’s most loved electronic acts blasts out of the corner with a scalding world class post September 11th re-masterpiece…

As friends of, uh, me, know, I’m slightly obsessed with the group and would classify myself as happy to know that this is coming out. “One of America’s most loved electronic acts”, I love it.

Also, in the category of music you can get right about… now. You should go get the dj James f’in [A - ed.] Friedman album Go Commando. I actually went commando today in honor of the release, since I didn’t have a car to go get it I think this was the least I could do. Here is a bit of dj J f F trivia, back in the day he (and maybe some others??) hosted a show on WBAR radio called ‘Rinse Out’. I also hosted a much lamer show (for one semester)… I am honestly telling the truth when I say I cannot remember my own show’s name, it was that awesome.

Anyway, get the album. My bad not seeing him when he was in LA, but I was hell of busy.

My stereo on four wheels gave up the ghost the other day. Well, more like it fell at the hands of a master of the “I’ll fix that soon” school of maintenance, me. That and the oil light was broken, so I had no way of knowing just how bad the oil leak situation was.

Now, the question is, how long can I live in LA without a car?

What the heck are you doing? Seriously, do you think reading something about procrastination will do anything for you in your needlessly dire predicament?

If that didn’t scare you off, here is a conception that I think fits into all of the rave ideas about productivity (under the ominous dude in suit talking about how to make your organization work more effectively (any guesses on how many readers of the book are close to running their own organization) book with its own TLA GTD):
You can do one of two things on a project:

1. Nothing
2. Something

Think of these as two points on a vertical line. (I’m thinking of this with time as the horizontal axis) Now only one of those points is lit up at a particular time, you are either doing something about the project or not. One could get into taking the deltas and doing some sort of renormalization group theory on it (hints of what I should be working on creeping into this), but let’s say for now you’re either on (#2) or off (#1). As time progresses and you find yourself procrastinating on project β it just means that you’ve spent to much time in mode (#1) reading stuff like this and a million other sites that just make me feel like I’m procrastinating just thinking about them. (Note that as the end of a given semester comes up, I think there is even more blog and email writing/traffic as people do exactly this.)

But there is another way, step aside from project β and go over to project α. Projects is broad, I mean doing the dishes to arranging the prelude to your opera. Something that is pretty dang easy to get started on and maybe has a nearly 99% chance of success (barring a broken dish or a really bad chord progression). Once you hit it off with project α you’ll be thinking, crap maybe I can go back and slog away at that miserable project β carrying some of this Rockin’ Project Starting (or continuing) Momentum! You may have not gotten anything done on β while you were working on α but at least you have something to show for it, instead of increasing your knowledge of out of this world news or whatever. So it’s like your still working within your one dimensional confine of time, but at least you are actually doing something, albeit orthogonal to the thing you were procrastinating on. Make sense..?

Good luck and get back to your own thing.

Other info:
this researcher says procrastination is bad. Yep.

You should read this great opinion piece here (select.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/opinion/06kristof.html). Oh, wait, you can’t. At least without some fiddling, it is nearly impossible. If you are at a .edu, like myself, you can go read it by a rather simple search on Lexis Nexis. Don’t worry, all you will learn is some lukewarm statistics on how bad Americans are at math and how much Americans lauds scholars of the humanities.

News flash, people hate scholars of the humanities, perhaps more than they hate scientists and engineers. Lumping in lawyers with humanities scholars (as the article does), you have right there one of the most hated groups around… here is an informal list picked off of a BBC website:

A Member of Parliament was voted as the least respected profession followed by estate agent, government minister and lawyer respectively. Journalist was the fifth least respected profession in the top ten followed by footballer.

Ok, so maybe Real estate agents aren’t the most humanities versed people in the world (sorry to my friends who do that), but whatever, no one respects those people.

Just because the populus as a whole is generally ignorant of science doesn’t bother me too much, but I do worry about getting kids interested and not scaring them away (speaking as a PhD student in the Materials Science). I’ve found the easiest way to not be scared away is just to not listen to people who say you can’t do it. Somehow Kristof’s metric seemed to miss at least one famous physicist (unless he was counted among the doctors) Rush Holt in our house of representatives. Now on that tip, as a semi-rabid anti-last-5-years of U.S. Federal Government direction, one might want to go through the executive summary and see how well the recently enacted ‘no child left behind act’ and other such education legislation has followed the “National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century” recommendations. Well?

Much love to my humanities studying friends out there, I know for the most part many of you have all sorts of science skills and at least some respect for those of us that pretend to (aka me) Ethan, a classics major, has been known to titrate at work.

So to sum up, I’m still not happy about the Times Select thing and I think science gets a fair amount of respect in spite of the rhetoric of intelligent design and the ignorance of those who either didn’t pay attention in school or didn’t have a chance to (there’s many in the second category).