There is a program called PawSense for Windows which detects “cat-like” typing, and then prevents further keyboard entry. I found some code for filtering keyboard events on Mac OS X, and I wanted to implement something similar. But this raises an interesting question: just what characterizes “cat-like” typing? The PawSense website suggested that cat paws are […]

This morning I went to the car to see if I could start it, and at least move it back and forth a bit (as I still don’t have my license). Fortunately, the car started! Unfortunately, the clutch doesn’t seem to do anything. I am holding down the clutch while the car starts, but […]

Two interesting things about taking a bath… The first was, while singing in the bathtub, I hit a resonant frequency, and I wondered: what can be deduced about the shape of my bathtub (well, bathroom) from this frequency? The second was that I heard something fall into Tasha’s water dish; thinking nothing of it, I was rather […]

Here are some very ill-thought-out ideas on Kolmogorov complexity. We define a metric on the space of bit-strings . For a universal Turing machine , let be the “length” of the shortest program that outputs on input , or outputs on input . This should measure how difficult it is to […]

Often, Tasha picks something up (say, a pen, or a lego), carries it around, and then drops it into her water bowl. I have no idea what she is thinking when she does this. On the topic of cat thoughts, the Wikipedia article on cats observes: Some theories suggest that cats see […]

By the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the volume of a hyperbolic 4-manifold is proportional to its Euler characteristic. There are examples, constructed explicitly in Ratcliffe, John G.; Tschantz, Steven T. The volume spectrum of hyperbolic 4-manifolds. Experiment. Math. 9 (2000), no. 1, 101—125. of hyperbolic 4-manifolds with every positive integer as their […]

I left California far too quickly: some people that I had really wanted to see I didn’t get to see. But I got to spend a lot of time with my dad, which was excellent, and the conferences and Berkeley itself were a lot of fun. I understand why clutching functions are called clutching functions: […]

Gromov, M.; Piatetski-Shapiro, I. Nonarithmetic groups in Lobachevsky spaces. Inst. Hautes Études Sci. Publ. Math. No. 66 (1988), 93—103. Vinberg, … Margulis’ amazing arithmeticity theorem says that irreducible lattices in Lie groups of high () rank are arithmetic. But has rank 1, so a question is how to produce non-arithmetic lattices. […]

I am still in California, and very much enjoying public transportation. Yesterday, I took AC Transit’s 65 bus (the “Euclid” bus) along an extremely (and therefore ironically) curvy road to get off the mountain of MSRI. (The “mountain of misery” belongs in a fantasy novel.) There’s a lot of people in California I would […]

I’ve made it to Los Altos: I’m going to be staying with my dad, but during the next couple weeks visiting Berkeley to go to a conference, and to meet up with my advisor. I ended up talking Route 22 on VTA, and then walking a few miles to go here, in the dark, using GPS […]