Category: Uncategorized

Topics that don't need a category, or don't fit into any other existing category.

All the Words of the Reindeer

Merry Christmas! In keeping with the season, I present to you my latest chapbook, All the Words of the Reindeer. It is all the words I found (2078, it turns out) I could create with one letter from each of the reindeer names in Twas The Night Before Christmas. My longest chapbook yet, it's a sort-of followup to my 2024 chapbook, All the Words of the Rainbow (which used the common names of the colors of the visible spectrum (ROYGBIV)). Printed and staple bound at home, zine-style. Share your postal address with me and I'll drop one in the mail to you. Merry Christmas! enter image description here enter image description here

scariversary

In December, 1975, at the age of nine, I had one of the most significant experiences of my life: I spent a week at Boston Children's Hospital to have one of my congenital heart defects, a coarctation of the aorta, repaired by cutting the narrow section out and stitching the resulting ends together (an end-to-end anastomosis, I believe). They went in through my left side/back, and now I've had this long scar for 50 years. Happy Anniversary, scar!enter image description here

trombonscalator

A new track. I've been posting something every day on Soundcloud, but I really like this one I made today. I used a piece of a field recording I did that includes a trombone and an escalator. This track is entirely in the spirit of tape music: though done digitally, it could, theoretically be done entirely with tape (with many, many, many splices). I hope you enjoy it! https://soundcloud.com/matthew-m-conroy/trombonscalator

mosaics from text

I haven't done new mosaics in a while but I had the idea to try images of text. I used a tiny, old, english-language bible for this mosaic, sorting "darkness" from left to right. This one is from an old, german-language art dictionary I picked up at a yard sale years ago.

More mosaics here and <a href=https://www.flickr.com/photos/31382652@N00/albums/72157684474997934/">here.

another dice problem

I added another problem and solution to my dice collection. It's problem 77.

Here's the problem statement: "Suppose we play a game with a die. We roll once, and this first roll is the score. We may continue to roll and add to the score, but if the roll ever divides the score we start with (e.g., if our score is 15 and we roll a 1, 3, or 5), then we lose everything and end up with nothing. If instead we choose to stop, we win an amount proportional to the score. What strategy will yield the maximum expected value of our final score?"

This is an optimal stopping problem. I've been interested in optimal stopping problems for quite a while, as a result of these dice problems and other things. However, I haven't found a really good introductory text to the general theory of optimal stopping that really appeals to me, so I end up doing things rather "from scratch" whenever I solve such problems. I feel like I might be missing some useful tools, but I'm not sure that is the case for the simple problems I'm solving.