Website activity diary 2008

This is a record of major changes in my web site in the course of 2008, a relatively slow year for this site's evolution – see the inactivity post below. For more recent activity, see this page's successor; for thoughts of sporadic moments in 2008, see the relevant (short) part of the relevant page.

On investment

a lengthy essay contrasting investment, usury and gambling, prompted by the economic catastrophies that result from over-application of the latter two.

Half a year of inactivity

For quite a lot of 2008, I squandered my copious free time on improvements to the tuple of prime numbers (and related infrastructure) provided by my pythonic study package. That will take a while longer – the earlier quotes are all sarcastic !

Extending Pascal's triangle

On the night of 2008/Jan/26–27, I had the demented idea of using the gamma function, Γ, to extend Pascal's triangle to the entire complex plane. This revealed complications when the inputs are negative integers, whose resolution proved mildly illuminating.

lac Lagrange

On 2008/Jan/25 I had a frivolous discussion of a body of water in space, large enough to be self-gravitating. I can't remember whether it was Eirik or Johan who was contemplating it as a water sports centre, but it lead to the idea of a reservoir in Earth orbit at a stable Lagrange point of the Moon.

Physics

New year tidy-up.

2007, 2006
earlier history.

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