I am frequently amazed to discover that songs which I had believed to have been original are actually covers. It turns out, for instance, that TMBG’s “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” is a cover of a song from the 1950s. Ironically, one might argue that Istanbul is itself a cover of Constantinople—and that argument (unifying form and […]

For a metric space, and , define the length spectrum of S to be . It might be better to call this the “distance spectrum” or “distance set.” Ian, during his Pizza seminar, gave the following definition: a set is a -distance set if has cardinality no greater than . In […]

Most mammals produce their own vitamin C, but humans carry a mutated form of the gene responsible for one of four enzymes enzymes necessary for vitamin C production, and so we humans must find it in our diets. In effect, every human being has a metabolic deficiency! And in light of this wonderful news, why […]