No, this isn’t about some hot new way of using Voronoi diagrams to google myself; I’ll leave that challenge to Mario.

I was looking over the search terms that had led people to my blog today, and decided to click on “Alan Shaw” Voronoi. Among all the recent stuff, I came across some papers and articles from my pre-Flash (and pre-C++) days:

Automatic construction of polyhedral surfaces from voxel representations (1988)
Generalized map makers problem: optimal flattening of polyhedral surfaces

Applications of Computer Graphics and Image Processing to 2D and 3D Modeling of the Functional Architecture of Visual Cortex
A Numerical Solution to the Generalized Mapmaker’s Problem: Flattening Nonconvex Polyhedral Surfaces

Now to reread them after twenty years and see if they were all bullshit.

We achieved reasonable performance on a Sun-2 microprocessor system (which is roughly comparable to a VAX-750).

Uh huh.

Here’a a video by mike40033:

Just about every weekend I go to my favorite local restaurant, China Fun, for one of the traditional meals I got accustomed to long ago in Taiwan: 鹹豆漿 xián dòujiāng — “salty” soybean milk, meaning hot soybean milk with sliced-up 油條 yóutiáo (”oil-stick,” i.e. fried cruller), dried baby shrimp, pickled veg, cilantro, etc, as opposed to 甜豆漿 tián dòujiāng “sweet” soybean milk with just sugar in it — and 韮菜鍋貼 jiŭcài guōtiē — chive (and pork) fried dumplings, or “pot-stickers” by literal translation of 鍋貼. Up here on the Upper West Side the soybean milk is only available on the weekend, although in Chinatown of course it’s a daily staple. They know me pretty well at China Fun; I never spoke English to them for the first few years, in order to encourage them to help me keep up my Chinese. And when I show up on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon they pretty much know what I want. But of course one has to make sure.

There are two expressions I hear for “the usual”:

照舊 zhàojiù “according-old”
老樣子 lăo yàngzi “old appearance/way”

舊 and 老 both mean “old”; usually 舊 is applied to things, and 老 refers to age, as of people or animals. I believe that 老 is natural in the expression 老樣子 because 樣子 originally refers to a person’s appearance. In fact 樣 shows up in Japanese as the formal suffix -sama, used in place of the more neutral form of address -san.

I have a feeling that 照舊 may be a bit more correct/formal than 老樣子 for “the usual.” Certainly it’s higher on the literary vs. colloquial scale.