Content-Type: text/shitpost

I quit twitter before it was cool.

Last night I dreamt that I was explaining to someone how to solve a certain math problem. I said you shouldn't consider the situation as an ongoing process, but instead imagine it as a fully-realized decision tree, and then apply the Davis-Putnam algorithm. In the dream someone spoke up from across the room: “You mean the Davis-Putnam-Brown algorithm.”

“What??” I exclaimed in mock surprise. “Next you are going to tell me that Bunyakovsky discovered the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality!”

Tell me, Dr. Freud, what does this mean?

It's not enough to make the coffee, you also have to drink it.

In many Christian communities, it is traditional to eat cheese on Holy Saturday, to commemorate the day Jesus spent ripening in a cave.

As far as I can tell there are no octahedral cathedrals. Why not?

Google search produces several claimed examples, such as the Cathedral of San Flaviano in Giulianova. But photographs make clear that this is actually an octagonal cathedral, actually an octagonal prism surmounted by a dome. Similarly, St. Basil's cathedral in Moscow has a floor plan with a roughly eightfold symmetry, but is not octahedral in any way.

Polyhedral buildings are common, but the space is dominated by cuboids. Even the Kaaba in Mecca, despite its name (“cube” in Arabic) and its enormous religious significance, is only approximately cubical, visibly irregular.

The Egyptians famously made pyramids but they are all pentahedral. none is a tetrahedron, much less a regular tetrahedron. A regular tetrahedron is too steep for practical construction anyway; the Egyptians had bad experiences with overly-steep pyramids.

It should not be too hard to make a building in the shape of a regular octahedron, considered as a triangular antiprism. I would be surprised if there weren't one somewhere. When I am King of the World, there will be an octahedral cathedral or someone will have brief but very uncomfortable conversation with me about their failure.

Also, where the hell is my Sonar Taxlaw fanfic?

[ This had been sitting unpublished on the other blog for six months. It has now been weighed in the balanc e and found wanting. ]

If a billion is a thousand millions, and a trillion is a million millions, how much is a pavillion?

Surely someone must already have discussed the Brazilian cotillion in the vermillion pavilion, it's too hard to miss.

(There is a joke about how George W. Bush, upon learning that four Brazilian miners were trapped underground, asked how many a Brazilian was.)

[ Previously ]

If the laws of physics are time-symmetric, why do I always have to preheat the oven, and never postheat it?

Sid Vicious, clearly.

In fact I think I'd be comfortable nominating the Sex Pistols as the worst band, overall. The world is full of obnoxious and incompetent bands. What gives the Pistols the prize is their insistence that they represented authenticity — maybe they hated you, but at least you knew it. This insistence, though, was itself nothing but a pose, manufactured by them and Malcolm MacLaren.

It's 2022! Is Groupon dead yet?