Screen Saver

This semester, since I'm in class every evening Monday through Thursday, I'm having to tape almost all of the television shows that I watch. Tuesday evening, that's "Gilmore Girls" and "Veronica Mars". I've set my satellite box and VCR to record them automatically every Tuesday. Or so I thought.

Since they're back-to-back on the same channel ("The New CW"), I set the satellite box to tune to that channel at the beginning of GG, and the VCR to tape for two hours. I didn't bother telling the satellite box that I'd be taping VM as well.

Dish Network has a new trick. Under certain circumstances, presumably related to inactivity, it goes to a screen saver. It didn't go to the screen saver during last week's episode of GG, presumably because I'd set the timer on that show. However, I'd made no such request on VM.

That's right. My VCR taped a solid hour of screen saver instead of "Veronica Mars".

The kicker? GG was an episode I'd already seen.

Sigh.

Ramble, Part 3: What Euclid Did

As dan_ad_nauseam has noted in comments, it is not at all clear how much, if any, of Euclid's Elements is original with him. The elementary plane geometry and the number theory probably date back to the Pythagoreans; the more advanced geometry rests on the work of Eudoxus; and the detailed analysis of incommensurables that makes up Book X and the solid geometry of Book XIII are generally ascribed to Theaetetus. As a mathematician, he probably does not stand in the first rank among his contemporaries.

Nonetheless, he is probably the most famous of the classical-era mathematicians; the Elements was regarded as the premier textbook of mathematics for well over two thousand years. As a mathematician, he may not have been outstanding, but as a methodologist - in terms of his influence on how mathematics is done - he stands very nearly alone. (Only Descartes and, perhaps, Cauchy even come close.) Under the cut is some discussion of his impact.

( Organization Man )

Ramble Contents