On the rise

As a counterpoint to his miserable formula from a year ago, R. Stevens gives a metric for quality of life.

I'm very happy to have had both input variables move in the right direction recently. More sleep, less time in a car!

Delinquency

For those distraught by the dearth of mathematically themed writings in this space, may I suggest my shared items in Google Reader, easily accessed either by the first of the above links, or in the sidebar of this page, entitled "And what have I been reading?"

My distractions from these posts have not been all work. I've written before about the great strides being made in human-computer interaction, especially regarding tools for musical creation. Last Saturday night I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Björk (or B. Guðmundsdóttir, for the sake of nomenclatural purity) perform at the Shoreline amphitheater, with M. Bell at the helm of a reactable. This instrument, first pointed out to me by J. Hopper (who is inexplicably nigh invisible to Google), is similar to the audiopad from MIT's media lab, but with a crucial difference: it is out of the prototype stage, and in front of a mainstream audience. Hopefully commercialization is not too far off.

Since when is 'B' a number?