Tom 7 Radar
I can tell you this: I did that talk for A.E.O.U.D. in New York and then inhaled Manhattan wildsmoke/miasma for a few days and then came back. I'm trying to finish up that project and make a silly video about it, but freed from the constraints of deadline I'm also letting it wander a bit (not smart; I have at least 3 or 4 other rather-in-progress things that I would still like to finish) but who…
Hello my blog, my ball and chain, my primary source of -1,000 points for lateness. Did I know the month was ending? Yes. Was I sitting at my computer doing something else? Yes. Did I then just get tired and go to bed, forgetting about my chore? Again yes. One piece of cover is that my site was down yesterday. I foolishly rebooted my server without looking at it, and learned this morning that my…
Hi! I'm currently in STL (not the 3D printing format, although can we really be sure that we're not inside an enormous stop-motion 3D-printed simulation?) for a friend's 40th birthday / Festkolloquium. It's at the City Museum, which is a place I highly recommend and which is certainly rekindling my warehouse fantasies. I gave a talk about another geometry problem I got sucked into, which might end…
Good evening! I posted my project, which again if you are looking here to find first news of such things, I admire your commitment to the olden days, but you are doing it wrong. Speaking of the olden days and doing it wrong, my project is No one can force me to have a secure website!!! and it has both a paper and video : A pre-paid self own I also gave a talk at SIGBOVIK that you can dig up if you…
Ah, I did not forget about you, my little bloggie! But I have to act fast . March is always like this: I have finished or nearly finished my SIGBOVIK project, but SIGBOVIK has not happened yet, and so I have nothing to say here. I did finish my paper, a very dumb thing that I wrote 25 pages about, in order to make it dumber. I'm maybe a third of the way through putting together a video, which I…
Ha! This time I feel pretty confident that I'll lose zero points, or perhaps even gain a small number of bonus points, for posting from OGG Airport before a red-eye back from vacation, even though this requires that I post far before the end of the day here due to time zone. OGG Airport is Maui, Hawaii, USA, where they exclusively use the Vorbis audio codec. I did do some normal vacation things on…
Oops! You can tell that I'm getting old when I don't even notice the end of a month coming and going. Also that I thought, "I should add a template on my blog for when post late and need to award myself negative points. It should be called {{penalty}}." and then when I go to make that template, I find that it already exists: -1,000 points I spent the entirety of the month of January sick…
2025 is ending imminently! I am so happy that having made it through this year, we won't need to think about Donald Trump or AI any more. I posted a surprise video that may not be that surprising to close-followers of Tom 7 Radar: Mathematically extra-complicated secretest santa 2025! This is my Secret Santa protocol ; the latest in the series following Matt Parker's video from last year, which I…
I almost forgot it's the end of the month! One thing I accomplished this month is finally moving all my sites over to a new server. All of this was precipitated by wanting to use C++17 and later features (like std::format) in my various code, but the version of Ubuntu I was using on linux still had an old-ass GCC that did not support this. (I don't understand why it's so non-standard to have…
Hello again, I'm enjoying feeling no deadline pressure, and trying out a few new secret projects with no particular commitment to a "next" one, and playing some video games. Re: the previous project (spoilers), there was this Quanta article First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself about the success (not mine) on that problem, and I'm in there. I think Quanta is great and I read their stuff…
Hmm! Yes! I turned 46 years old, which was predictable. Also predictable, and predicted, is that I finished that darned video: Rupert's Snub Cube I also updated the project site with more data and links. I should have just posted this blog-post earlier in the month when I uploaded it; I don't know why I always save it to the last minute and risk losing 1,000 points. I guess I figure I might get…
OK! I am better now. Let's strive to keep it that way. I spent my free time this month continuing work on the proof described in the previous post, basically a big custom numerical search which was a neat blend of geometry (a little bit outside my comfort zone but I can wrap my head around it) and high-performance systems stuff (rational interval arithmetic) which is up my alley. It was actually…
Hi, Dammit! I got sick again. This time it was definitely Covid-2025 and it was pretty rough (I had a very bad sore throat, which I hear is characteristic of this strain) and it knocked me out of commission for a week during which I was expecting to have quiet time to myself to finish off this video! Instead the things that felt right to do were (a) play the new Donkey Claus for Switch II and (b)…
Ugh! I did make a lot of progress on this darned video (I have about 10 minutes of high quality content baked in now) and was hoping to keep up the momentum this weekend but I got pretty sick. I thought all week I was just suffering headaches from this medium-severe heat wave we've been having, but I think it was also me starting to get ill. It does not appear to be COVID or Flu-A or Flu-B (it is…
Heya, Earlier this month I spoke at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science's PhD hooding ceremony! The "distinguished" "speaker." I feel that that was quite an honor, and hopefully I did it justice. I'm certainly comfortable giving a talk but usually it's because I have something I want to talk about. These students are very talented and privileged and will do okay, but it's also a really…