I added two more sound files to my page of integer sequence noise. The new sequences are the palindromic numbers (like 121, 32423, etc.) and the set of values taken on by sigma, the sum of divisors function (1,3,4,6,7,8,12,13,14, etc.). The first doesn't sound very interesting, as palindromic numbers are a bit too rare and regular, but the second one is quite noisy. There is a bit of a peak at 44100/6=7350 hz, since multiples of 6 tend to be values of the sum of divisors function, but it's pretty uniformly noisy.

I turned comment approval back on. I've been getting several papermill spam comments every day for a while. Perhaps this will discourage them.

Wow, November is over. I've blogged every day this month, for the heck of it. I'll go back to occasional posts.

Today I assigned another "writing problem" for my honors calculus students. It is to show that x-1/6 x^3 <= sin x <= x+ 1/6 x^3 for all x. A nice result, and not beyond them at all. For some reason, inequalities appeal to me very much. I wonder why.

I had another migraine today. I mostly just get the aura (i.e., visual disturbance for 30 minutes or so). I take 500 mg of acetaminophen, and usually I only have a mild headache. Today, though, I felt really weird all afternoon. I think I may having broken my brain with all the grading I've been doing.

But then Inkscape broke my brain some more. It wouldn't start up. And this is after I've used it many times. I eventually found out (via the inter-tubes) that Inkscape doesn't like it if the fonts change, or something. I've recently been using Scribus, and I'm guessing that Scribus did something to my fonts, and then when I went to run Inkscape (after having not done so in some time), it would not go. Oh well: I cleared the x11 font cache, and Inkscape seems good as new. Whew.

Bought some new pedals today. I went with Shimano PD-M540s, because Counterbalance had them in stock. Pretty plain pedals, good enough for me.

Went to the 10 am Husky team ride today, but nobody else showed up. So, I rode out to Mercer Island and back (yes, again). It was really windy, but not cold at all (high 40s). A good ride, but about 2 km from home my right pedal exploded, coming completely disconnected from the spindle: I looked down, and there was just the spindle sticking out of the crankarm, the pedal still stuck to the cleat on the bottom of my shoe. A couple weeks ago, I noticed that that pedal wasn't turning well at all: it took way too much force to turn it. So I took it apart and greased it really good and put it back together. I'm guessing either I put it back together incorrectly, or something else was causing the problem before, and today that thing caused the pedal to fail. Oh well, I didn't like those pedals much anyway. I think I 'm going to try Egg Beaters.

Other than that, I spent most of the day grading my calculus students' essays on the Folium of Descartes. It is taking me forever to get through all 57 of them.

I have to come up with another topic for them for Monday. Googling "cool optimization problems" yields nothing. So now, it will. The problem is that the line between interesting/challenging and impossible is very fine. Plus, even when you come up with a challenging doable problem, often the answer is boring and obvious. Hmmm.

Saw the musical The Full Monty tonight at Balagan Theatre. A very small theatre, but they had a rotating stage which allowed for some decent scene changes. Jenni and I are very fond of the movie and know it very well, so it was interesting to see how it would translate into a musical set in Buffalo. It's not bad. Reasonably catchy music, and some decent acting.

The thing that makes the film great is editing: the film is extremely tight, and doesn't ever waste time. It is hard to achieve this quality in a musical unless you go the crazy, madcap route (we recently saw Cannibal:The Musical which takes this tack, and it was terrific). As a musical, I thought The Full Monty dragged a little compared to the film, especially in the songs intended to be more poignant.

Today was Thanksgiving. I've been vegetarian for the last 21 thanksgivings or so, so I'm not big on the whole meat-eating thing that surrounds Thanksgiving. I also have long been bothered by the traditional separation along gender lines that happens at Thanksgiving, and in general the excessive amount of effort that seems needed for the traditional Thanksgiving meal. In recent years, I've been promoting a simplified thanksgiving feast, and that's what Jenni and I had today, with a couple of friends we invited over. Jenni made spaghetti alla puttanesca (literally whore's spaghetti) and salad. The spaghetti was excellent! She also made a fantastic apple pie (Jenni never fails to make the best possible apple pie). We had cheese and crackers for an appetizer, and had a good time all around. I will have to do my part of the work tomorrow when I wash all the dishes (that's how the labor is divided in our house).

Did 35 minutes on the trainer before dinner, while watching Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. I really like it so far.

Just finished grading exams for my calculus course. I'm buried in grading until at least Sunday evening. Ugh.

Well, today was pretty much just a day. I taught my two classes, held fairly unattended office hours, did the dishes, graded exams for a few hours (got halfway done). Meh. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving, and we are going to have spaghetti with friends. Spaghetti for Thanksgiving is my new tradition that Jenni seems to be going along with. I like spaghetti, and I like simple food, and for people not to have to spend a lot of time preparing things. Jenni is going to bake a pie, though. That's awesome: her pies are really the very best possible pies.

Maybe tomorrow will be more interesting? At least the month will soon be over, and then I'll go back to updating only when I have something decent to share.

I watched The Bad Sleep Well, another in my project to watch all of Akira Kurosawa's films. I've now seen 20 of his 30 films, and I have The Lower Depths on DVD checked out from the Library.

The Bad Sleep Well was quite good, though it suffers a bit from blatant exposition: the characters often stand around and say things that all the characters hearing them already know, just to get the information to the viewer. I find this a bit distracting. The ending is treated somewhat anticlimactically by having one of the characters describe the ultimate fate of the main character rather than allowing the viewer to see the sequence of events he describes. Not necessarily bad, but an interesting choice.

I did a short ride today, just 38 km up to the north end of Lake Washington and back. It was raining the whole time, a heavy drizzle, if there is such a thing. The worst part of it was I couldn't see: the drizzle coated my glasses with tiny droplets, and that's far worse than what you get when it is properly raining. I had intended to do more like 100 km today, but the rain, my ability to see, and the fact that nobody took me up on my offer to join me made me happy to cut it short.

I wrote this little sketch on Sketchpatch today. It looks good on a fast machine: at work, I have 2.66 Ghz iMac, and it runs great there, but my 1 Ghz powerbook at home is choking on it.

This is the same idea as this old straight java applet. I wrote this a long time ago for the 5K competition for the coolest java program in under 5K. Might have been related to these folks, but it was a long time ago.

The Java version runs better. I'm not sure how Sketchpatch works exactly, but it definitely is slower than straight Processing applets. Maybe that could be improved?

In other news, I like this flash version of the old moon lander game.