If you are using IE 5.01 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later and the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components, you can play with this interactively by clicking on the flower. IE may give you a security warning. Apparently IE doesn’t trust Excel.
The equation is ampl + PM * SIN(petals * theta) ^ exp
Where
Petals is the number of petals in the lemniscate,
PM is +1 or -1,
ampl is a unit to add to the SIN function
and exp is an exponent
theta is the angle - you can’t change this.
An insight into neurolinguistics from an unexpected source. Lenny Bruce had died over 10 years before I first heard this on a vinyl LP back in the late ’70s.
“Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed. I speak English. That’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else. Then I must just take, ding ding ding, somewhere.”
– Lenny Bruce
Surfing the ‘net and came across this wonderful set of photos in which photographers show their imagination and Photoshop skills by creating an picture of themselves kissing themselves, hence “Selfkisss.” [Spelling intentional.]
What is surprising is the range of emotions expressed in the photos, and how true the photographers/artists were to themselves in creating a fanciful moment of self-love.
‘The marvellous thing about a photograph is that it captures a glance, a gesture, a moment, fleeting reality, the wellspring of emotion.
However, what is presented here does not exist, never existed and will never exist.
But through technical mastery, one stands before it, like a aerialist on his wire, in unstable balance between “I believe it” and “I do not believe it.”‘
– Louis Samaria, Pupsam
Tr. Leslie
[The] defilements are like a cat. If you feed it, it will keep coming around. Stop feeding it, and eventually it will not bother to come around anymore.
-Ajahn Chah, “Still Forest Pool”
From “365 Buddha: Daily Meditations,” edited by Jeff Schmidt. Reprinted by arrangement with Tarcher/Putnam, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
The boss sent me a geometry puzzle as revenge for one I sent him to solve. I shared it with my favorite philosopher. This conversation ensued.
ME, quoting the boss:
You have a rectangular piece of material out of which are cut two regular polygons of arbitrary number of sides, position and size. (Both holes are entirely contained within the larger rectangle.) Devise a method for dividing the remaining material into two equal areas.
Get back to work!
K: Slice it through from edge-on.
ME: The boss says “No.” He seems to think that the material can’t be split that way. Hmmmph. Where did he find cloth one atom thick? And why isn’t a nuclear blast a valid way of splitting it?
Update 8/2008: The material is probably a monoatomic-thick graphite substance called “graphene.” No idea where he found it.
K: I like nuclear blast; you collect the fallout into two buckets of equal volume.
ME: I made an infinite number of radial folds so that it was made up of an infinite number of layers of rhombi of width zero. Then I cut it in half radially.
He didn’t like that answer either.
K: Well, isn’t he special? Isn’t it bad for engineers to be rigidly wedded to a single answer when other solutions might be available?
ME: Yeah, really. You have to think outside the box, something bipolars are really good at. LOL!!!
Did I mention that after I came up with a truly ugly solution for the trivial case he told me oops, that should have been ONE polygon? Sheesh. So I choked him. I wonder who will sign my paycheck next time?
Ok, I went too far, propagating the “Muzzy Mouse” meme. It is ridiculous to stigmatize all Moslems based on the actions of a few WahhÄbÄ«m. We mustn’t forget that just a few years ago Catholic and Protestant Christians were murdering each other in the UK.
Personally, I think it’s time for all religions to take responsibility for policing their extremists.
Farfur the Mouse of Hamas’ al-Aqsa TV has been pulled off the air “for review.” Farfur is a Mickey Mouse clone whose job was to indoctrinate Palestinian children not with Islamic values, but with terrorist propaganda.
Video clips showed a guy in a mouse suit pretending to shoot an AK-47, while a little Mousekahideen looked on.
Hamas may not be much impressed by threats from Israel, and certainly not Mahmoud Abbas and his scarecrow Fatah. But angering Disney apparently strikes fear into the terror group.
The only surviving child of Walt Disney has called Hamas “pure evil” for using Mickey Mouse to teach islamic radicalism to children. Diane Disney Miller said she was disgusted that a rip-off of her father’s iconic cartoon character was being used on a new Hamas TV show to encourage Palestinian children to take up arms against Israel and America.
[...]
“It’s not just Mickey, it’s indoctrinating children like this, teaching them to be evil,” said Ms Miller, who owns a winery in northern California.
“I read something recently . . . and this one phrase leapt out at me from the book DAMAGE by Josephine Hart. It says, ‘Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.’ And that kind of sums me up.”
– Dusty Springfield
neurolinguistics
Lenny Bruce
EFT
emo
Photoshop
Self Love
,” edited by Jeff Schmidt. Reprinted by arrangement with Tarcher/Putnam, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
geometry
think outside the box
engineers
Farfur the Mouse
Mickey Mouse
Mujahideen
Palestine
Hamas
Disney
AK-47
Mousekahideen
al-Aqsa
Farfur
Fatah
Wahhabi
Dusty Springfield
