Tweets from 2012

so far, I am spending a statistically significant percentage of 2012 listening to kpop youtube.com/watch?v=3fy4cq…

@standupmaths nine days?

Walking on frozen sand is a lovely feeling

@mathshistory established Greenwich AT the location of the prime meridian?!

that was my least successful shave ever. #basicallystillhairy

@Andrew_Taylor precisely for that reason.

@Andrew_Taylor doesn't that make sense?

my supervisor and I have got to the "vicious back-and-forth comments" stage of editing this paper

on a related note: I don't like people who use a fixed line-width in TeX documents. I'm prepared to get into a big twitter fight about this

@EliotBall lines are max. 80 characters long.

@EliotBall yep

@enchamade I mean in the source .tex, not the compiled document

"Enthusiastic network marketer - born again pagan - I'm collecting cashback with Cashbackcard - are you?" - worst twitter bio? I felt sick.

@peterrowlett the "born again pagan" bit worries - another symptom of poor critical thinking, or of a willingness to do anything for money?

@ellenirites I beg to differ: it was quite a popular middle name in 1911, viz. 1911census.co.uk/search/results…

@ellenirites in 1861 there was a Ms Peyton Luff of London

@ellenirites unlikely names are somewhat an interest of mine nameoftheyear.blogspot.com/2007/02/key-no…

Watch in amazement as I completely fail to notice my tripod is falling over! youtube.com/watch?v=Z6_ION…

@peterrowlett can you do it in any base? the @MathsBusking person who showed me said she couldn't. I was making a video to show how.

@peterrowlett alright, I'll just go and make one then.

@peterrowlett once the person upstairs has finished hoovering, of course...

@peterrowlett sound insulation == be far away from objects making sounds. Right?

any idea why my video is only uploading at 10k/s to vimeo?

@AdrenalGBR is it ok to post your 3x3 grid puzzle on my blog as part fo the december recap? I may be asking more questions as I forgot lots

thanks to @aperfect, christian@hotmathematicians.com is my new email address. Next step: arXiv contact information!

@Electrokittie snaggly frown :<

similarly alluring addresses are available to sufficiently-hot mathematicians (contrapositive: not having one => not a hot mathematician)

@Electrokittie well, I didn't need to see that! Yeesh.

@ColinTheMathmo of course I assume that, given the opportunity to have such a winning address, any hot mathematician will accept instantly

@Electrokittie second-class Oxford degree. Borderline.

@ColinTheMathmo don't quite understand what you want, so have you seen traintimes.org.uk? maybe ask him where he gets his data?

I've made a video: The Ace of Base (-three numbers) trick - vimeo.com/34478966

@jjsanderson that's considerably more than I drove mine, I think.

@peterrowlett @SallyRobin I was staring at this like mad last night, but then it clicked: (rot 13 code:) snpgbevny vf n hanel bcrengvba

@AdrenalGBR what was the name of your friend from Warwick?

I had my legs crossed for too long and now they are dead! At some point soon I'll have to get up to make dinner oh me oh my what a to-do

I've finally written up December's Newcastle @MathsJam: checkmyworking.com/2012/01/newcas…

@stecks there are MORE?!!! I thought the quicksort was the only one!

@gingerbeardman sadly, this particular instance of quantum levitation is fake metafilter.com/111217/Old-vid…

@numberloving Simon Tatham's puzzle collection has a slitherlink game (called Loopy) that can do loads of shapes: chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzz…

@Andrew_Taylor twitter automatically sends links through t.co these days

@Andrew_Taylor oh, but I see you meant "why does twitter do this?"

@peterrowlett if you're not going to link to those dancers I will in the Aperiodical

@peterrowlett it's deliberate spam not scattershot spam. If it was email it would be one message with many BCC. Only looks bad bc of twitter

@peterrowlett but yeah, TEDx is a scourge

@standupmaths write pi in base 24; assign digits to moves. Will the cube be solved at some point? Doesn't follow from normality of pi.

some interesting comments on my December MathsJam recap post checkmyworking.com/2012/01/newcas…

@peterrowlett I've made a bajillion edits to my reply to your reply, in case you've already looked at it

@JSlayerUK what's the essay on?

@JSlayerUK and what's the title?

@JSlayerUK do you have opinions on the matter?

@JSlayerUK is that an essay's worth of opinion? I think so. Get cracking!

@RANIELDANSON fines go up the more times you get caught, so this isn't a sustainable strategy

somebody run at me with a knife while reciting the definition of plutôt, please

interesting name, interesting guy! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio_…

more interesting Victorians news: I'm reconsidering my opinion of Alexander Graham Bell mathcraft.wonderhowto.com/blog/alexander…

@naomzzb it's impossible to be cynical about that program

@ellenirites carry your DS at all times, in case we run into each other. I've heard Professor Layton has some very interesting maths puzzles

@stecks so does the reception team appear just as you're checking out?

@stecks so inconvenient! and I suppose if I wanted to convene a meeting that would also cause hilarious problems

@aperfect google news alerts?

Why oh why wasn't Zen recommissioned? I did so love his sexy crime-solving capers

The research station at the south pole has a copy of The Thing... on Betamax - mikeygoingdown.tumblr.com/post/123182338…

does there exist a decent free-ish or cheap-ish video editor for windows?

@ellenirites The Asda Delivery Man Always Knocks Twice (then eats your yoghurts on the way back to the depot)

just submitted a new @gaussfacts.It's that kind of day.

@charliesgames I approve!

@standupmaths potential bonus-heckle re the podcast: "billion" was invented in 1475, but Greeks were talking about "myriads" well before

@standupmaths said heckle only valid if you were talking about people starting to think about big numbers, not just about the term "billion"

the people at brume must be wondering why I order a new blackboard wall sticker every six months

@ellenirites with hollandaise sauce?

learn how to speak cross-discipline with p257 of this excellent document: ets.org/Media/Research…

What a long apple!

@brittneybean my dad does. He still runs his own Microsoft Exchange Servers in his garage though, so he might not have the best judgement.

Ok @MathsJam, if nobody else is going to do it, I will. Can I have a list of requested locations, so I can make a map?

@peterrowlett I assumed @stecks would see that tweet, plus anyone else who's had enquiries. She knows how to contact me!

@peterrowlett patience, Rowlett! It's the morning

@stecks super! @peterrowlett : poor show, your page on mathsjam.com doesn't say where you meet. Where is it?

A map of current and potential @MathsJam locations: g.co/maps/yb88n (cc @stecks @peterrowlett)

Stopped at Wetherby services. Leo is having topological issues with his jumper.

@AdamJackzon yes, I did. An oldie AND a goodie!

I have reached the South and I have updated the @MathsJam map with Nottingham, Melbourne and Portsmouth g.co/maps/f7rgs

@RANIELDANSON that's the kind of completely equivocal recommendation I can really appreciate!

@peterrowlett @stecks ok, I've added a bit to the bio saying to email manchester@mathsjam.com or tweet @MathsJam

@christianp @peterrowlett @stecks @MathsJam hah, see how "bio" has come to mean "bumf at the top of the page" in my mind!

mathemategwyr Cymraeg and mathematoryon kernewek: there is a MathsJam-shaped hole where you live. Get on it! g.co/maps/f7rgs

@peterrowlett 80 news: my nana was 80 yesterday. She'd love a math/maths shoutout

Just been told the place for nana's 80th party today has a flock of alpacas in the grounds. Considerably more excited now.

@peterrowlett @Samuel_Hansen to be very clear: I'm requesting a cp-ancestor mention. My policy on hearing my own name remains unchanged

@elinoroberts some of these puns are pretty hock-neyed

@jcoglan shave your moustache first, then sideburns, and beard last. #unhelpfulneckbeardadvice

@jcoglan it's as if I spent the last year setting that joke up!

Have found myself wedged under a table. Need to move out without pushing the table. Curse you, Newton!!!

@Samuel_Hansen you scoundrel! For a few glorious moments I thought you were both genuinely trying to avoid mentioning me.

@elinoroberts ohh, don't you find that place a little bit creepy?

Just passed an Austrian tourbus emblazoned with the slogan "Beat the Street". Do you think they meant "hit the road"?

Whenever I see a full moon partially obscured by clouds, only four words and a guitar riff come to mind: TEENAGE! MUTANT! NINJA! TURTLES!

@Rosalot disagree. They were ninjas more than heroes, and the tory-era ban on nunchuks in the media was so ridiculous of won't perpetuate it

@christianp @Rosalot *I* won't perpetuate it

@pkrautz you now have 100 followers. Congratulations!

@Rosalot there was a moral panic about ninjas, hence "hero turtles". All the really cool kids knew the real name. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_M…

@Rosalot PS my full signature book from universal studios, even with scary Casey Jones, hints that I am a bugger fan than you

@Rosalot ha! Bigger fan! Autocomplete hates me twice!

what voodoo is this! webdemo.visionobjects.com/equation.html?… like Microsoft's math input panel but over the web

@alexbellos did you watch Sherlock last night? Thee floors in the secret lab were negative numbers followed by a B at the bottom

@trackinthebox your 404 error page has an error. You're either meta geniuses or you didn't mean to forget the word "one"

please make: a Civ-like game called "TORY QUEST" where it is your job to impede progress as much as possible (cc @PeterMolydeux)

I've had just about enough of these Whigs and their stranglehold on longplay strategy paradigms

Clothes collection chuggers: putting two bagsthrough our front door because we have two buzzers is almost Panglossian in its optimism

MathsJammers: ideas for readily-available materials I can use to make a set of lominoes? schoengeometry.com/webbooklet.PDF

High tension in PHD2 as Cushing attempts to fix the last couple of squares of the sudoku cube

@stecks I do not know what they are! Could you provide diagrams?

@stecks I don't understand that. It seems to leave everything unchanged.

Solvèd! Thanks @stecks!

I've added some good stuff to my Interesting Esoterica collection recently: mendeley.com/groups/519971/…

@TylerClark12 good!

what's the opposite of a SQL injection? I clicked a button and this intranet site filled the page with the query it should have executed

I like theorem statements beginning, "Suppose $P_1, P_2, ..., P_n$ want to play poker."

well, I've ruined my landlady's wall and my blackboard sticker has bubbles behind it. That's just about the worst that could have happened.

I hope this was worthwhile

@Electrokittie what were you showing us?

you're damn right the LaTeX I used in my tweet earlier gets properly typeset on my blog

@Electrokittie hahaha that is excellent!

@ben_nuttall re poles on trains: I almost gave some kids a lesson in rotational inertia - jump and hold on to the pole when the train stops

ok Dyson, when are you going to invent a bagless bin?

@nulibsage the only freely-available definition of Fibonacci p-codes I can find is at comlab.uniroma3.it/marco/articoli… in Section III

Tempted to use my phone's barcode scanner on this dudes neck to find out exactly what consumer product he felt was so important

@Samuel_Hansen have you seen the draft? I'm trying to marshall the energy to finish it. I have loads of links

@Samuel_Hansen can you get on Skype? Is it a reasonable time where you are?

@peterrowlett an interesting email should currently be at the top of your inbox

@stecks good point, I'll send it to you too.

@stecks by publicly twittering peter, I was actually prompting people like you to remind me of should have included them

I do wish my phone would stop rewriting 'I' to 'of'

@peterrowlett as far as I'm concerned, that other email was responded to at mathsjam. I wouldn't mind if you *do* reply to it though...

today I learned that at least one French mathematician thinks "Soazig" is a good name for a human baby

I've done another Internet Maths Aperiodical. This one's a corker. acmescience.com/mathematics/13…

@alexbellos I did not think there needed to be another book on the subject after "the geometry of pasta"

@RANIELDANSON I'll ask just in case: are you getting all your tax credits?

4music: come for Nicki Minaj, stay for the advert with women shaving their moustaches

@standupmaths quesclamation sounds like what dinosaurs did to reproduce

@RANIELDANSON can't hurt to have a go at the questionnaire: hmrc.gov.uk/taxcredits/sta…

@standupmaths best you can do is 379. 379,397,739,9638 prime but 793, 973 not. Answers with repeated digits: 113, 199

@christianp @standupmaths well of course I meant 963 not 9638

my 1177th prime birthday is the day after my 26th real birthday! Double festivities!

@christianp and I should read my computer better: 149 also has 4 prime permutations

@standupmaths my method (in Python, of course!): gist.github.com/1594133

@jcoglan ctrl+shift+v

@jcoglan I think the behaviour has just changed to formatted-by-default recently. It's been annoying me too.

@elinoroberts <~~ little poke about maths making?

the difference between 'condescend' and 'patronise': to 'condescend' is to act haughtily; 'patronise' is what you should do to Deli Bar One

spend five minutes checking something works in a Python shell before realising your app is written in Ruby

@HilariousCow haha, saying "I'm always in trouble" while riding a skateboard is so massively 90s

@stecks could my MathsJam map go somewhere on the website?

hey, one header in this Word document inexplicably written in Consolas - you're my favourite

@brittneybean I'm curating last night's dinner in a hot new venue.

Further adventures with poorly-chosen tripod positions youtube.com/watch?v=ls_sGr…

@acmescience do you read Cabinet too? My love for it is unbounded.

@alexbellos I did a similar bit of computation-with-a-dictionary: checkmyworking.com/2011/12/grunt-…

made chilli. Don't have any sour cream. If I don't make it through tonight, tell Janelle Monae I love her.

@Tony_Mann don't you mean Nature Valley 3, then?

@jcoglan because when you ask that question you end up with madore.org/~david/program…

@CloudoidLtd could well be. They certainly offer both boxes and sandwiches

I think this guy would like to know if anyone is looking at his site: date12122012.blogspot.com

I don't want to be awake now!

@peterrowlett well, that's still data

Today I am (I think) wearing pink on yellow. Do I need style advice or am I a Fashion Maverick?

@brittneybean photosofvinylalbumsheldinfrontofmacbooks.tumblr.com

@brittneybean @trackinthebox so happy birthday from me too!

Changed his mind.

@stecks don't make me go to hobbycraft! That is a slippery slope I wish to remain at the top of!

@plusmathsorg if you're going to explode, do it on one side of the Atlantic and not in-between. They frown on that sort of thing

I'm an evil genius: I have decided to make a rubik's cube with ratchets in, so each face can only turn one way

@EliotBall yes, but the look on someone's face when they first encounter it will be priceless

@EliotBall or: can you think of a set of interlocking ratchets that restrict the number of positions the cube can be in?

David claims that this is a tetrahedron

@RachaelBailes the only job title where a prefix of "she-" is acceptable is "Hulk"

ok, bake caking time

I hardly ever do #ff, but I will today because his blog is pretty interesting: Twitter, please pay attention to @outofthenorm2

@mathshistory I baked a cake today for my birthday tomorrow! I missed a golden opportunity to make a Menger sponge! Woe!!!

dear Newcastle ISS: this is not acceptable content for your root apps site: apps.ncl.ac.uk

ahh, I forgot to tweet this yesterday: yesterday's date was a palindrome in base-13

@aperfect I want examples

@Samuel_Hansen aww, you deleted the crazy man's comment on the blog :(

@Samuel_Hansen is this a network q: how long should it take a service to have most things you'd want on it? Eg wikipedia, youtube, the web

@Samuel_Hansen indeed. It feels like something that would be fun to work out a methodology for.

Never change, Nana.

Oh my god, I've just looked inside:

The Christiansmas festivities are off to a fine start with the traditional goose parade youtube.com/watch?v=wK-YHT…

Remember to check your programme so you don't miss out on any of the fabulous Christiansmas activites throughout the day

I've gone a bit silly with old age.

@ellenirites you look wide-awake to me

@Rosalot would you like a lecture on queuing theory? It's very interesting, I could go on for ages

@Rosalot there is an optimum queue length they want to maintain at all times. So they change the staff levels as incoming call rate changes

@standupmaths @TimandraHarknes you're not going above Harrogate? I was about to drum up some PhDs to see you!

@TimandraHarknes @standupmaths one of the aforementioned PhDs is also a standup. I will enquire.

I just thought to try j/k to scroll through tweets. It's a @Christiansmas miracle!

@Andrew_Taylor @standupmaths @pixie359 well, @peterrowlett did basically that in his Travels in a Mathematical World podcast

@pixie359 but he got his facts from numbergossip. So listen to his podcasts anyway, just not for this reason.

I'm going to sell savoury pastries under the name Quiche Thegwin.

my Gauss fact got on the site!

Did anyone else feel physical pain trying to parse this "graph" in the Observer New Review today?

In happier news, this is what my mum got me for my birthday. Trust me, I have a plan.

@jjsanderson forget pens, the first writing implement I would import would be Hagoromo "Fulltouch" chalk: mathoverflow.net/questions/2626…

@peterrowlett stop tricking me into clicking on your old posts!

@RANIELDANSON *discreetly unfollowed*

@RANIELDANSON its not that I don't think you can kick the habit, but just to be safe...

@RANIELDANSON cold hard science

@peterrowlett while I've got you - do you have any thoughts about that thing?

@karenshancock I have been wondering exactly the same thing

some nice 3d-printed models by Rinus Roelofs: rinusroelofs.nl/sculpture/rp-m…

@ellenirites are you going mad with instagram again?

Baaanach-Tarski instagr.am/p/hMHiP/ (thanks @ellenirites and @Bishnavitch)

@standupmaths I used to think I did, but since I moved away from home and kept the same detergent, it cleared up

@peterrowlett there's a chat window and comment boxes. I'm in there now.

@plusmathsorg subjects of the British Empire do not have a terrifically good record with world domination plans that begin in Massachusetts

AAAAAAAAAAA WHY DOES IE CONTINUE TO EXIST

@Nathan1123 the thing I'm making has to support IE

@Nathan1123 your tweet arrived simultaneously with me fixing the bug. Hooray for a coincidence!

@Nathan1123 I've been working on this for two years. This is just the latest bug.

just now, while sat at home, about eight miles from the university, my computer told me "more information is needed to connect to eduroam"

This is a fun sundial. A fundial. mateturismo.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/el-…

@haggismaths could you add the things on your trail to mathsinthecity.com ?

@standupmaths my activities are not uniformly distributed throughout the year

reading wikipedia like a boss. Finally A-Level French is paying off!

@pkrautz (@peterrowlett @Samuel_Hansen) do one this week. I still haven't "hung out", so I'll look in. Why math/maths, not your own thing?

@JSlayerUK your correction was about my MP!

ahhh this algorithm would be so much easier in Haskell but I'm working in javascript and I just want monads why is life so hard :( :( :(

oh hello, cutting-edge web-based exposition: igstan.ro/posts/2011-05-…

@Tony_Mann @peterrowlett however, I found Newton's college notebooks that were put online quite readable.

@peterrowlett @Tony_Mann the Cambridge one, I think. Whichever one @acmescience linked to.

@acmescience @Samuel_Hansen your two accounts' profile pics are facing each other. It looks like you're having a conversation with yourself

@trackinthebox when you redesign, could there be a way of listening to all the last week's tracks without clicking between pages?

@brittneybean I think that's the first tweet I've sent you whose response didn't match the regexp /@christianp (ha)+!*/

@alexbellos at the very least it's in PSPACE

Midday. Poo and a shower, then clothes. #livingthedream

@peterrowlett before I read that, can I just say how nice it is to have a project report site with no design rubbish on the page

@HilariousCow I don't know, and please don't RT the answer because I don't want to know

@AdrenalGBR go on then. Are you sure it's difficult?

@AdrenalGBR oof, that's not a programming problem, I don't think. Is it OK if I retweet from the MathsJam account?

@AdrenalGBR also, I want to fix your notation but I'm doing something else at the moment

6 hours of concentrated thinking = lambda operations in my algebra system while preserving implicit multiplication. Need a lot of drinks now

These are the fiercest waves I've ever seen here. Where are the surfers? Are these waves TOO fierce?

@Bishnavitch what what?

@elinoroberts I'm a tall man, as you know. For a moment I considered the possibility that I might get blown out to sea.

@daveowhite @mathsinthecity I would replace my Ampelmann umbrella with a Maths Dave one in an instant

@skrivr I've just got an invitation and started a blog. Page loads and sync seems to be failing. Are you under heavy load?

@skrivr ok. Is there any reason why that would make the settings pages or even the 404 page not load fully?

@skrivr and does the fact you know that mean you can look in my entire dropbox folder?

@acmescience I did not know you were doing this! It alone has made relatively prime worth the money.

@acmescience then I'm glad I gave you so little money. I got an excellent deal!

@stevieb How have we not bumped into each other at conferences? Thought you got a job after your MMath, had no idea you were doing research

@skrivr yes, it looks like it's working now, thanks

@HilariousCow this just in: women also shave.

@stevieb I'm doing more jobs than would fit in a tweet, plus a PhD on group theory / computability

@stevieb somewhere in the middle. I'm self-funding and part-time, so no idea when I'll finish

@mike_geogebra @davidobrador shapecatcher.com lets you draw the character you're after.

@danaernst skrivr.com/christianp/ it's very flakey, which is why it's still in beta, I suppose.

@danaernst I don't really have a need for it, because I've got my own proper wordpress blog and takenot.es for quick notes

@danaernst yes, I have christianperfect.calepin.co - I just signed up to help Theron get MathJax going, really

@danaernst checkmyworking.com . My workflow is to write stuff on takenot.es (instant TeX preview!) then copy it straight into wordpress

new year's resolution: get over my infatuation with clever domain names. hotmathematicians.com will be my last one, promise.

when did I download this album? It's pretty fun! It's by The South Trio.

This summer in cinemas: Iron Man, the Iron Giant and the Iron Lady are... STEEL TEAM SIX

Sorry, I couldn't think of three more metallic neocapitalists/destroyers of industry

@aPaulTaylor could your game be rewritten in javascript?

Yavalath, a computer-designed board game: cameronius.com/games/yavalath/ (via @outofthenorm2, whom you should #ff)

@peterrowlett you have a doppelganger at Newcastle University! Aaa that freaked me out!

@stecks @aPaulTaylor is that the co-op membership form? I remember it had an exhaustive list of titles

@Bishnavitch soon, Muthurangu, soon.

@outofthenorm2 the hairy ball theorem is an excellent choice for a barber

there is a name for the happiest mode of transport: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting

"90-95% of indigenous peoples were decimated by European diseases" - a scholar of the humanities on BBC4

Arg, this is a bad documentary about a really interesting subject!

@ellenirites there's a way of preventing that... #unhelpfulnonsmokeradvice

@peterrowlett Gowers is rallying people to boycott Elsevier, and the traffic to his blog is spilling over to mine a bit gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/els…

@peterrowlett oh man, that's what I get for replying before reading all the way up my twitter feed

@peterrowlett because he has a link to my MathJax bookmarklet on the sidebar :P

@peterrowlett better than being just "a tool"

Missed my mouth, got toothpaste on my face. #dyspraxia!

Whoah, that Ben & Jerry's van up at Cullercoats is a bit optimistic.

@EliotBall the Chrome developer tools are very good

@EliotBall good stuff. Do you know about prototypes in javascript?

@EliotBall it's just a good idea to declare methods in the prototype rather than in the constructor

Rrgrgrggg, Flash music download widget!! Share my outrage, @brittneybean!

@EliotBall gist.github.com/1657503

@brittneybean wasn't even the audio. I just wanted to middle-click the provider's logo to see who they were.

@EliotBall I've just added some explanation at the top of the file

I look at the publications list of someone like Zeilberger or Svante Janson and I think, what's the point. Let them discover all the facts.

why is copying text from PDFs such a hassle? Can't the information about, for example, where the spaces between words are, be kept?

@Andrew_Taylor It's a problem pretty much unique to PDFs. Most of these files are generated by LaTeX, from the looks of them.

@Andrew_Taylor I *think* that the reader program has to infer the presence of spaces from the positions of glyphs on the page.

@Andrew_Taylor the problem is that a pdf is just a list of where to put symbols on a page, not a coherent representation of the text

@stecks could the link to my MathsJam posts on the Newcastle MathsJam page be changed to the category listing? checkmyworking.com/category/maths…

@christianp @stecks actually, I've realised that category has non-recap posts in it. This one, please: checkmyworking.com/category/maths…

I'm trying something a bit ambitious on my blog: a summation of my interesting esoterica collection checkmyworking.com/2012/01/intere…

@acmescience do you know that none of the links from the C&P Classic RSS feed work?

@CloudoidLtd I don't think I have! You should post a comment with a link to it.

I can see really faint aurora stood on the point at the bottom of longsands beach

Man, the people in that plane must be getting a good view

@jjsanderson should've stayed in Tynemouth! I got out just as it was reaching its peak.

@Samuel_Hansen can I just say what an excellent job you did on the podcast this week, in my opinion.

@JSlayerUK BECAUSE POOR PEOPLE ARE GETTING ALL THE MONEY DON'T YOU GET IT

@acmescience haha, that's an excellent idea

to do a global find and replace on a file and have it compile correctly immediately afterwards is a sublime joy.

@Samuel_Hansen that's a mighty short post on your blog there, Samuel. Ephemeral, I'd even go so far as to say. Not that it's a bad post...

today's grand insight: $x - y = x + (-y)$. I'm a good PhD student.

@ellenirites Old age is pretty fun. You can walk into a place like you know what you're doing with your life and nobody calls you out on it.

@standupmaths please, get some MathJax on that blog!

@standupmaths also, use the <code> tag (the wordpress editor has a button for it) around your Python code so indentation is preserved

@standupmaths & finally, wp-footnotes is a good plugin. It makes footnotes which link back to the relevant bit of text. elvery.net/drzax/wordpres…

@standupmaths I can email you the code if you'd like. It literally takes two minutes to paste it into your header file from the admin page.

@standupmaths also, @danaernst and others are planning a mailing list for mathematicians with WP blogs. I'll tweet it when it exists.

@Gelada @standupmaths @danaernst well that sounds like we have a quorum. @pkrautz is keen as well.

@mattybeardsmith how many people work there? Not sure you've spotted a trend there

@acmescience top stuff!

Milton Jones is a Brilliant Mathematician: bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod…

I got a present for ya! apps.nahklick.de/cnc/

@mathsinthecity we should publish a picture book of the times we manage to look stylish while carrying unstylish things.

Getting familiar with Lominoes. I will be trying to build a ziggurat at tonight's @MathsJam

is it just that twitter search is bad or are old tweets actually forgotten after a while?

@outofthenorm2 is that problem related to Golomb rulers? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ru…

@aperfect so I should be saving my tweets somewhere in case I want to refer back to them?

@lizmallard the creator will sell you some if you email him: schoengeometry.com

This dude's talk would be a lot easier to understand if I could see laser pointers

@pkrautz failed hard. But it would've been easier, if not objectively easy

new game in the office: get to my blog with an unlikely google query. Current leader: "the esoteric turtle and the carrots"

@pkrautz yep

new winner in mathem-o-blog quest: "the irrational rubik's cube at mardi gras"

or: "the case of sherlock holmes and the esoteric lego egg"

@peterrowlett you'd better check your registration status!

Off for a cheeky Micky D's before @MathsJam

@pkrautz they've reverted to the old one, so depending on cookies and caches, it'll either appear or not for a while

@stecks are you getting much done in Manchester? A write-up of our night would just be, "we played with Lominoes then went home"

@peterrowlett @MathsJam or it's a double-bluff, and the answer is no for a surprising reason

too many computer scientists named Philip.

@ellenirites @sadiestrong I will eat something similar! Good idea!

I took 7 pages of notes at last night's MathsJam. Durham students are too keen.

Linguistics fact: Jèrriais, the Norman French spoken on Jersey, sounds like normal French spoken by someone you want to punch in the face

these clouds are gathering, like, Storm-from-the-X-Men-fast.

@GhostMutt what's going on there?

women of twitter: do you also get "female" spambots following you, or male ones? Or none? Is sexism rife in the evil spammer fraternity?

The wind turbine is 120! That's 2pi/3 in radians. On 25/1/1892 James Blyth presented his new invention - the wind turbine (via @nulibsage)

@GhostMutt PHP's an odd choice. Is there some syntax you're comfortable with only in PHP?

@GhostMutt javascript, dude. paper.js is a good simple library for doing graphics

@brittneybean their about page reads like what a 9-year-old girl who isn't yet aware of feminism would imagine she'd write when she grows up

@aperfect @kenfodder @brittneybean @moomerman I'm having burgers tonight too! Except they're homemade and I'm putting plastic cheese on top

@jcoglan hidden semantics yeaaaaaah! It's like how the RT button doesn't just stick RT in front of a tweet any more

hello, new Belgian followers! Why are there so many of you?

Listening to Clare and the Reasons unapologetically. Ain't no apologies forthcoming.

@enoFsamohT Cantonaftershave

@clareandreasons nope!

Yeah, numbergossip.com is fine, but how about numberslander.com? I know 7's dark secret.

@ellenirites @RANIELDANSON you're both wrong. "Yourself" as a subject pronoun makes me very very angry indeed.

Mathematicians with Wordpress blogs (in particular @standupmaths): ask questions about blogging maths on wp4sci groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/…

@ellenirites @ranieldanson "Would yourself like anything else?"

@ellenirites @RANIELDANSON on the internet, nobody knows you've got a posh voice, like wot I does.

@ellenirites @RANIELDANSON and I fully accept that that previous sentence was nothing other than hateful

@RANIELDANSON @ellenirites time to break out some Greek: Heteroglossia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroglo…

@ben_nuttall sorry snopes.com/politics/milit…

@Rosalot that is a hilarious name for a blog

@Htbaa you might find Champernowne's constant interesting

seriously good fish from Marshall's tonight

failing to make a ziggurat of Lominoes: youtu.be/5fUIX1xp1cI

@standupmaths on that subject, I'm going to share a google document with you. You might have some thoughts about it.

@Bishnavitch Metal Gear Cosby youtube.com/watch?v=7tTPNi…

@brittneybean oh wow, n+1 doesn't look like J. Wellington Wimpy's Geocities page any more!

@mathsinthecity I'm looking at the site for the first time in ages. Is there a way of getting a list of all sites, sorted by date added?

@mathsinthecity EXCELLENT!!!

@mathsinthecity you might even be able to tempt me down south with such a trendy accessory

@daveowhite I ask my uni's systems the same. It doesn't let me log off until I delete things, so I think the former is empirically true.

just discovered that / starts search-as-you-type in SumatraPDF, just like in vim.

there should be an annual Mathematicians' Rounds where we go to other departments and point out what they've reinvented with worse notation

(reading a computer science paper which spends ages defining "2-to-1 functions", which are just binary relations)

update on my little survey: seems everyone gets female spambot followers, regardless of their own gender identity.

Trying to attract undergrads to @MathsJam with @stecks's postcards.

no, the entire point of LaTeX is that you don't do the spacing manually. (editing someone else's text)

@TimandraHarknes but it costs some unlikely combination of change, or you have to get a token off someone and it's a hassle, so why bother?

just a little bit tired of Chrome pasting text with formatting included by default.

how do I get to a position in life where it's my job to watch this video all day? youtube.com/watch?v=3fy4cq…

@standupmaths you say that as if it isn't something you do regularly :S

How to get beautifully typeset maths on your blog: checkmyworking.com/2012/01/how-to…

@peterrowlett I would appreciate it if you mentioned my MathJax post on #mathmaths. My mathematical week: declaring LaTeX jihad!

@standupmaths unless Google is just one person - "qoud vos, Google"

Might be time for a new Dr Robotnik. He's gone blind and most of his wires are wonky.

@rockhyrax midnight slug espionage!

@rockhyrax they clean up after themselves in the sink. It's the perfect crime!

@JSlayerUK I would patronise that establishment for both my tort[e] needs.

@Andrew_Taylor @standupmaths but the snowflake obstacle in the Wipeout zone has the correct symmetries

@OddballDave twitter seems to have forgotten I'm following you. Well, it's a quiet Saturday night, I'll buy your game now.

@JSlayerUK or less, if he continues ruining the company the way he is currently

why is nobody using something TeX-ish, i.e. a macro language with minimal syntax, as a template language for the web?

man, I'd probably hate heroin. The noises I make when I haven't had any chocolate in a while are bad enough.

@EliotBall no, it doesn't have macros

@EliotBall macros are new commands you can define in the text to abstract out common patterns.

@EliotBall yes, well, I was asking why nobody had done that

@EliotBall the usual reasons people want templating languages

@Bishnavitch sad/happy times

Today, Christian Perfect is: CRINKLY MAN.

If someone you are meeting for the first time describes themselves as "old and fat", does etiquette demand that you fail to recognise them?

@ben_nuttall Greggs pasty. That's a rough approximation to a pie.

@peterrowlett arg I need to write up Newcastle MathsJam and I have so much other stuff to do!

@peterrowlett massive pedantry on the solution page: the singular form is 'tetrahedron'.

@peterrowlett although it is quite fun spending an evening doing the writeup, and it gets a lot of hits and discussion

@jcoglan like having a gun in the home, I'm much more worried that I'll forget my own master password than that hackers will crack it.

Does there exist a CCD which sees light in the bit of the spectrum used by wifi? Do human bodies reflect it or are they just opaque to it?

@Electrokittie can and should

@mike_geogebra is there a timetable for the html5 implementation?

@mike_geogebra is most of the performance lost in the computation, rather than rendering?

@mike_geogebra I've been staring at the .js files thinking there's no way that's enough code, then I remembered you used GWT!

@daveowhite twitter seems to be doing an excellent job of forgetting for me

@daveowhite losing old tweets is the biggest problem

@standupmaths "kids say the most quantifiable things"

@peterrowlett I wither under the heat of your mad social media cross-promotion skillz

Not sure why I misread Leonhard Pfeifer as Leonhard Euler but that's the most excited I've been about a John Lewis window display in a while

@stecks look at the end of this video youtube.com/watch?feature=… - I'd love to see them do more of those orbits you talked about at mathsjam

@daveowhite well, the argument could be made that Google's IPO changed how they work considerably

@ben_nuttall the Euler characteristic is actually a design motif

I dislike bug reports written in the passive voice.

somebody called Jon with a rich baritone should open a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye called Jon Tomes

my blog is in a coma :(

my blog has arisen from its coma! Thanks, @aperfect!

new @MathsJam organisers might like this big collection of really interesting puzzles and games gurmeet.net/puzzles/

I've rejoined the Coincidentally Colour Coordinated Clothing Corps with a brown t-shirt and this rather fetching mustard yellow jumper

spambots have excellent names. Mignon Bonifont, Melania Griffiths, Telma Fabry: I wish you were real people!

Note to me: apple juice benefits from being shaken. Apples do not.

@PeterMolydeux you're just repeating plots from Round the Twist now

Decided I was going to take three steps at once but that thought didn't get down to my legs in time.

@peterrowlett I'm perfectly fine. Thanks to my height, I had enough thinking time to rectify the mistake

and my blog is ill again :(

@RANIELDANSON one day your loyal #FFing of me every week will be rewarded. Not today, though.

@peterrowlett so should #gausslies be true? @gaussfacts are mainly false.

@standupmaths have you been in one of those ones that moves continuously and loops round at the top? They scare me.

I've got a really quite enormous lumpen spot in that little crevice behind my ear. Worried it's like a boll weevil or something.

@Electrokittie hah, those are totally Auntie Sheila shoes. Aunties of other names need not apply.

@Electrokittie come on though, you can do better than that. Sheila's Heels.

@standupmaths google has helped my memory! They're called paternosters and Leicester Uni has one youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3Isb…

@standupmaths big in Germany, of course, where people can be expected to behave themselves youtube.com/watch?v=0siUw7…

@standupmaths @Our_Frank @thought4day2 @jonny_nichols @charlotteyoung wow, loads more than I thought! Someone update nerdydaytrips.com

@mathpuzzle it's been a long time since you last updated the site!

someone called exactly as an album finished playing. I like that.

@Samuel_Hansen @peterrowlett what about Erdos's enormous collection of left shoes stolen from his collaborators?

@chaosdynamics @jeffemanuel especkley? ekspecially?

the set of universes in which Cibelle is correctly classified as "country music" has measure zero. Stupid emusic.

@chaosdynamics that's hilarious. Remind me never to visit Boston or I might get fisticuffsome.

@stecks you're in Newcastle tomorrow, yes? Coffee and Lominoes?

@stecks as you're tourists, I suggest the Baltic. Alternatively, heading into town, there's Blakes or Cafe Royal

How is it possible for a man of 26 to make this much mess eating soup? #dyspraxia!

nearly at the end of my notes on January's @MathsJam. This recap post is going to happen, people!

@madcaptenor I think it does.

Finally! The Newcastle @MathsJam January 2012 Recap: checkmyworking.com/2012/02/newcas…

stop looking, we've found the free-energy source: finnishdesignshop.us/-kukka-reflect… "in addition it reflects in the dark"

@ellenirites Cheer up! Dog with silly boots! animalsbeingdicks.com/post/169749474…

@mariondov pi is defined in terms of the properties it has. Series representations are often derived from trig functions with known values.

@mariondov but there now exists a formula for individual digits of pi without working out the previous ones, so calculations can be checked

Oh man, you really don't want to see a spelling error on a sign in a tattooist's window.

Got in a good round of blue plaque bagging. Got 9 plaques around the quayside, Byker and Heaton. Now it's snowing so I'm going home.

Pay homage to the Sun King! Documentary on Louis XIV starting on BBC HD now.

oh no never mind, it's awful

to the author of this article: you've saved neither space nor time by rounding the price up the first time it appears bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla…

@TraineeGeek email Alan Schoen: schoenah@gmail.com

Frozen sand! Best sand!

Wahey!! (I may have cheated a little bit) #lominoes

@peterrowlett @Samuel_Hansen superbowl maths puzzle: explain how a 60-minute game takes FOUR HOURS to finish

@standupmaths @qikipedia I worked out how big the bucket would be so no. atoms in bucket = buckets of water on earth takenot.es/?water%20conta…

The plot thickens in my mathematical investigation, with the inestimable assistance of PI Pi.

because it's Sunday and I've run out of things to do: a blog post about atoms of water checkmyworking.com/2012/02/puttin…

@lizmallard its just over a teaspoon if you're counting molecules.

EXCELLENT. Just did a yawn exactly like Peter Ustinov in Disney's Robin Hood. #vibrato

I love how if you leave a TV on these days the only thing that gets burnt out is the planet.

@ellenirites we were having a discussion in the maths department about the practicality of storing soup in tupperware. I see where you stand

@ellenirites can't really remember, but empirical evidence of expected spillage was sought in the staff kitchen.

oh wow, the Proceedings of the FUN with Algorithms conference is treasure trove of excellent paper titles informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/f…

@ellenirites ah, but we were discussing it as a means of getting soup into work

@ellenirites PS "soup into work" is a policy to be announced at the next Tory Party conference

way more pictures of old carrots than you need, but nowhere near as many as you want carrotmuseum.co.uk/manuscripts.ht…

@Electrokittie for the record: Lana del Rey is not hot. That top lip is an automatic disqualification.

Arg, Neil Cowley's new album is too beautiful! I am an emotional turtle flipped on its soppy back, feelers all waving in the air helplessly

I'm so emotional that I'm looking at curta calculators on ebay. This is my equivalent of drunk-dialling.

@Electrokittie word on the street is that so is her entire face

@ellenirites what is that salad doing there?!

@ellenirites eugh. Reconsidering whether I should follow you.

Walking down stairs takes a lot longer when you take them one step at a time. I don't know how you short people don't go mad with boredom

you have permission to rock out while reading these papers: latexsearch.com/latexFacets.do…

@AdrenalGBR true recollection of events

@ben_nuttall Resources tab. Click on Frames -> (myfile.htm) -> myfile.htm. Tada!

@ben_nuttall oh no, that's only got new selectors in it.

@ben_nuttall though if you do make changes, the stylesheet in the resource tab is changed to reflect them, and the original is underneath

I'm editing a WordPress plugin. I hate PHP so much!

@ben_nuttall we're (some people you've heard of) collecting our individual blogs on one site. We've got a plugin which imports our posts...

@ben_nuttall but it needed changing so imported posts have the same publication date as the version on the original blog.

@ben_nuttall not quite

getting some burgers out of the freezer. If they're thawed by dinner time, bonza. Otherwiser it's carbohydrate bumholes, aka tortellini

@mathsinthecity ooerr, tiny fame. @standupmaths has since informed me that London's circle line now has the same topological property :(

@mathsinthecity it's OK, this is how Science! is done. I'm going to start petitioning the council for a loop-the-loop in the Metro, though.

@mathsinthecity every time I go to IKEA, I forget to take a pic of the store map as an example of fractional dimension for the website

@mathsinthecity can you send an undergrad to take one? You have that kind of power, right?

it isn't even funny how long my body takes to recover from just walking for a couple of hours. Day 4...

@mathsinthecity incredible. And I've just discovered that google maps has enormous difficulty searching for ikea

there are only 18 IKEA shops in the whole UK?! I feel like a Byzantine discovering the Western Roman Empire collapsed 600 years ago.

@aperfect really though?

NVDA read "résumé" as "resume" and "resume" as "résumé". The mind boggles.

@enoFsamohT it's funny because now I'm thinking about you handling your own poo

@standupmaths is this a marginal utility of tea thing, or would the consumption of tea always have negative utility for you?

@jcsteh probably microsoft. I've been switching between the two

@jcsteh while I've got you - how well can NVDA read MathML?

@stecks @peterrowlett *cough* blog post please *cough*

@charliesgames how much fun maths was involved in the pathfinding? Could you do a mobius strip, for example?

@charliesgames so if they're diametrically opposite the player they won't move at all?

@charliesgames mobius strip: take a strip of paper. Put a twist in it. Glue two ends together.

@plusmathsorg have they really made a Turing machine? They've made two two-state FSAs, which aren't Turing-complete.

it is enormously annoying that codetalks.org has disappeared off the face of the internet

@plusmathsorg my tut remains. Don't pull a New Scientist.

@RachaelBailes your badge and your gun. You're not quite there yet

@Samuel_Hansen I reckon I've got another Internet Maths Aperiodical for you, when I find some time and energy to write it up

@Samuel_Hansen huh, I suppose. Not sure how long until it's ready

can anyone explain to me which way is up in this product photo? amazon.co.uk/Eva-Solo-Magne…

@ellenirites is it a sequel to creepy 18th-C abuse-of-trust-fest The Woman in White?

Dear Diary, Today everyone found my colourblindness hilarious. Sigh. #gotthepurples

@laurareeshughes @numberloving but the golden ratio doesn't really have much to do with beauty - see maa.org/devlin/devlin_….

@laurareeshughes @numberloving however, @SparksMaths has a very nice Geogebra applet about a real application of phi - sunflower heads

@standupmaths as you're seemingly in the maths jewellery business now: how about Gibonacci bracelets? maa.org/columns/colm/c…

@JPickford does the second M in ISMMTTM stand for Monkey or for Mate?

so far tonight I have found three different, contradicting, definitions of "Gibonacci" sequences. Can anyone think of any more?

going to see if I can put in a requisition order for a couple of these to go in the school reception: designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/v…

@HoeJodgkiss you mean this? youtube.com/watch?v=psAgEd…

@peterrowlett @mathblogging aw man I thought I was in for certain this week. I'll beat you next time, Rowlett!

oh no, I made toast like 30 minutes ago. Now it's cold and brown! There is no rescuing this toast! #woe

@TraineeGeek gosh! That's quite a few of us have bought Lominoes now.

@peterrowlett mathmo.

@peterrowlett make it so! It's pretty clear what it means.

@peterrowlett @xabl if it's good enough for @ColinTheMathmo it's good enough for me

@Electrokittie @Bishnavitch I'd love it if you changed "phenomena" to "phenomenon"

@xabl @peterrowlett @Gelada something something reappropriation of a derogatory term

@peterrowlett I'm classically trained in the art of rhetoric

@pkrautz Jan's mathsjam recap was the biggest yet checkmyworking.com/2012/02/newcas… and I wrote instructions on MathJax blogging checkmyworking.com/2012/01/how-to…

Been thinking hard all day. Squash and chocolate time.

@standupmaths I think some of your thief traffic is spilling over into the princess/castle problem and finding me on google for the solution

Mathmos, in particular analysts: is there any sensible definition of exponentiation on matrices that copes with real-valued exponents?

@ColinTheMathmo why have you got the band being stretched instantaneously in 1m increments? Ease of exposition, again?

@ColinTheMathmo Righto. We did the continuous one at NCL mathsjam, and we'd all forgotten how to spot an integrating factor problem.

@aperfect in CoffeeScript, whitespace is more significant than a raised eyebrow across a room

@pkrautz yeah, I was mainly teasing @peterrowlett

@JSlayerUK Il faut cultiver son jardin

I've written a lot of work emails today that have to be signed "Christian", not "cp". Not happy.

syntax error on line 1337! y u no like me, c0mpilr?!?!

@jcoglan do you ever use it on windows? It throws up modal IE javascript error dialogs every now and then, caused by crashed adverts.

@peterrowlett is #prdayoff the hashtag for your day of liberated mayhem?

@peterrowlett @mathsinthecity break into the Science Museum and steal their Curta calculator for me

Blog post: MATH PROBLEMS? checkmyworking.com/2012/02/math-p… (following @mathsinthecity's tweet of that flyer earlier)

@mathsinthecity well, I wasted my afternoon solving that: checkmyworking.com/2012/02/math-p…

@peterrowlett my mathematical week: I just solved a flyer checkmyworking.com/2012/02/math-p…

Eurg. #dyspraxia!

this might be the hardest Loopy puzzle I've ever seen

Unexpected massive bonus koala!

FINALLY. That 3 in the middle right was done! I hadn't noticed!

Everyone else finds Norman really creepy. Philistines.

@Andrew_Taylor I'll guess "psychology research grant"

@alexbellos your blog is down

@mariondov We know the definition of pi. You can work out the value, or series expansions, from that by pure logic.

Gnarly thumbwound is coming in handy (ha!)
It expressed my frustration at being panne d'essence for all of 1000 bornes

@mariondov this pi book looks good: amazon.co.uk/Pi-Biography-W…

@elinoroberts it's either that or the Sunday Service, so go for it

@standupmaths that gives me the idea of designing a (finite state? pushdown?) automaton which recognises all coffee orders

@Electrokittie my studies of Rose Byrne's features have not yet got below her chin, never mind her feet. Maybe others start from the bottom?

@Electrokittie I will conjecture that every part of her is good-looking, so maybe these people have a point.

@jcoglan ok, now you need to make an audio filter that tries to shift any singing towards an ethereal whispering of the words "WHAT AM I"

I've blogged again about the additions to my interesting esoterica mendeley group. There's some properly fun stuff! checkmyworking.com/2012/02/intere…

@peterrowlett ♫ Peter and George, sitting in a tree, doing a double integral on a closed curve ♫

@MathsJam I've just noticed that Feb MathsJam coincides with pancake day? What are we to do? I take pancake day very seriously

@HilariousCow I have so many issues with the maths on that page. Mainly, the use of the percent sign when percentages are not being used

@stecks @Andrew_Taylor is this one of those PR things or a real thing?

@mathsinthecity @phillyg1990 people who attend the tour might like to join @MathsJam in the evening

@mathsinthecity @peterrowlett Peter is as northern as I am Australian

going to open a cupcake shop called Zorn's. (you'll have trouble picking just one)

@peterrowlett nice, but no RSS! I was thinking it could get brought in to the new site somehow

@Bishnavitch @Electrokittie @ellenirites @mattybeardsmith pancakes, my house, next Monday. Yes?

@outofthenorm2 I once had to do those calculations while driving a friend to the pizza place. Very hard to concentrate on the road.

@elinoroberts the *second* bounce? It has a coefficient of restitution greater than 1?!

@brittneybean anything by Cornelius

I love saying "that's a weight off my mind!" to my barber. Not sure if he appreciates it.

@standupmaths Get Surrey sounds like a a really boring gangster film. Or maybe the big-screen adaptation of Midsomer Murders.

@TraineeGeek shouldn't that be second-last tuesdays? Or are you doing your own thing?

David's new game: take turns choosing edges. First to pick a cycle loses. What happens when it's played properly?

reconsidering my ambition to one day be a German youtube.com/watch?v=-MNzna…

@GhostMutt crumbs! Where have you read that?

@GhostMutt got a link? I need more context because it's a complicated topic

@GhostMutt ok, it's a bit of an unusual phrasing. "Limits" usually involve seeing what happens as a parameter tends to infinity.

@GhostMutt e.g. "the limit of 1/x as x tends to infinity" is 0 because the difference between 1/x and 0 gets smaller as x increases.

@GhostMutt on searching, "passage to the limit" seems to be popular with Russians. I would use "take the limit".

@GhostMutt Right. Because it doesn't settle on any one value.

hah, any paper downloaded from ScienceDirect is called "science.pdf". I want an exclamation mark in there!

also in re ScienceDirect: those poppy-uppy headers and footers with the 1000ms delay are really quite annoying.

time and motion planning is great except when it results in all the toilets in the building being cleaned at once

@mathsinthecity I don't know how you do things in Oxford but we're a little more civilised up here.

@FakeElsevier I can only hope I never meet someone who read that and took it to heart

@JSlayerUK chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzz… - Loopy; choose the "Cairo" type

@Bishnavitch @Electrokittie animalsthatdopeoplethings.tumblr.com

at home with a cold today, so I'm listening to The Department and taking a panadol every time @hellobuglers says "testify!"

My dad brought me this back from London. Have no patience for this kind of thing but Kurt is making a compelling case.

points against: 1) maths isn't just equations; 2) physics is; 3) most of these are physics equations; 4) mug is wider than it is tall

@Bishnavitch I'm ill! Apparently you called me 7 times. I love you too dude but after four you can assume I'm asleep.

@Bishnavitch I say no, I'm ill.

@KSCMaths @standupmaths oh you know it. χ²

This is the most beautifully unhelpful diagrams I've ever seen in a maths textbook (Papy's "Groups")

I forgot to celebrate this book's 200th birthday! It is my oldest possession.

The things you find at the back of a bookshelf...

My original Creatures disc!

@peterrowlett I've been going through my bookshelves and found some cracking maths books, including one 201 years old (see tweets passim)

does it annoy anyone else when undergrads use "we" when they actually mean "I"? eg, "we can't solve this equation by the usual method"

in fact, I'm against the use of "we" pretty much anywhere outside a group report.

@NoelAnn yes, that would be better.

@peterrowlett yeah, but I don't like being implicated in my student's inadequacies

@peterrowlett @NoelAnn oh I did! I'm thinking of stuff like "we prove that ..."

@NoelAnn @peterrowlett at NCL we don't encourage anything - apart from occasional comments on homework, we give no training on writing maths

@ellenirites @Electrokittie @Bishnavitch @mattybeardsmith (plus several mathematicians)

my mouse has decided not to scroll when the cursor is in a narrow band 20% from the left of the screen. Trackpad works fine. WHAT.

reminder: Feb's @MathsJam is this Tuesday, the 21st. At NCL, I intend to discuss spambots and abelian card games. mathsjam.com

The milk bounced off my Frosties and on to the kitchen surface. So I'm not dyspraxic, I just live in a slapstick movie.

aww yisss that was my 4000th tweet and it was a good one!

@peterrowlett this withering satire considered too short or too inflammatory for second rate minds?

my mad scrolling problems were being caused by Facebook messenger. I am at a loss.

@ellenirites @Electrokittie nobody has ever been sectioned for hallucinating sausage dogs.

@standupmaths I'll blame the torygraph's copy editors for the fact question 1 asks you to find a pair of numbers which has 6 different sums

feel sort of bad for making @Electrokittie and @ellenirites flip pancakes against their will but those are the Rules of Pancakes

@peterrowlett I just checked and I'm coming up for five years on twitter! Has it even been around that long?

@madeupstats the average pancake is successfully flipped 0.8 times

@peterrowlett I hope you won't be liveblogging the crime I asked you to commit

@peterrowlett I don't know. Maybe ask those two guys with the camera?

it's too hot! I'm melting!

@standupmaths I'm meeting my friend for dinner before mathsjam again if you'd like to join us

@standupmaths ah! 7 is when the pub stops serving food and when I need to be in the pub to start MathsJam. A conundrum!

@standupmaths and I was alarmed to notice the Melbourne @MathsJam was already underway when I got up this morning!

I dreamt I'd been put in charge of a baby orangutan! It was beautiful!

for those who don't have access to a pack of cards or some friends: I've made the game Mad Abel in python - gist.github.com/1883965

@standupmaths is it OK if I use your photos from last night in my recap post?

@standupmaths couldn't hurt!

The letter H is the eighth letter and sounds a bit like "eight" when you say it. That's a little bit interesting.

argrgrw why is flickr upload on android+htc so rubbish?

I had so much fun at last night's @MathsJam that I've written it up straight away: checkmyworking.com/2012/02/newcas…

@ScienceFest could you slow down that slideshow on the front page a bit? I'm a fast reader and I struggled to keep up

@ellenirites I read that as #wetgirlproblems. Wasn't wrong.

Mad Abel is also a good solitaire game. I just finished a round with an enormous 9-card smash

@ellenirites it's surprisingly tame

@kirkpatricke homeless! When they're back on their feet they can help look after the sick kids and the brain injured

just realised that in vim you can name the buffer you want to change to, instead of remembering numbers!

look, @Samuel_Hansen has posted a really properly interesting video on his blog blog.samuelhansen.com/post/180848606…

@Samuel_Hansen yeah, I dunno...

And now a nosebleed. My body is not performing well at the moment.

This seagull is laughing like Jimmy Carr. Or, Jimmy Carr has climbed onto my neighbour's roof.

@Samuel_Hansen @peterrowlett you could pass the time by playing Desert Bus

@ellenirites proof that the adjective "inviting" doesn't always apply to invitations

@Samuel_Hansen we like all the same things, why must we be so far apart?

@peterrowlett @Samuel_Hansen series 2 finished on Five here just before series 3 finished in the US. Series 1 on dvd is highly recommended!

@peterrowlett don't confuse Sam further with the class system. Though I enjoy both the Archers and Archer, so where does that put me?

interesting - somebody's using pandoc to generate both scriptogr.am posts and LaTeX PDFs at the same time (with maths!) scriptogr.am/michaelt/post/…

I think my boss just made a satirical commit message. Trying to work out if I'm its target.

@stecks @Samuel_Hansen @peterrowlett and they often read verbatim from government pamphlets about soil management during conversations

@MathsJam why doesn''t n=7, s=2 work?

@MathsJam then I don't understand what you're doing

@MathsJam Ahh, yes I do!

please help me twitter: is it possible to improvise bubblebath? I have a bar of soap and a bottle of vosene shampoo

@charliesgames I have some from-scratch quaternion code I can answer questions about, if you'd like

@mathsinthecity just remembered that I took a picture of an IKEA floor plan a year ago! I've added a site to the site: mathsinthecity.com/sites/fractal-…

my ear popped in the shower and filled up with water and now all I can hear is glub glub glub glub

This dude has the kind of idiot laugh that's surely so cliché that idiots would self-consciously avoid using it, lest they appear idiotic.

not to hot, not too bright, not too noisy: we can have any two in my office, but never all three at once.

@aperfect is there a service which will air-courier food from posh London restaurants up to me for my lunch?

@peterrowlett how kind, thank you

BBC Sport headline generator: <driver for mid-field F1 team> sets pace in <Spanish city>

now playing Mad Abel on $D_6 \times \mathbb{Z}_4$. It's surprisingly not-impossible!

@Gelada you got the spelling of 'noble' wrong in your post about being wrong.

@peterrowlett I'm torn. It's an admirable idea, but the execution is off. My thoughts don't fit in any of the things the survey asks.

@mathsinthecity I wouldn't know about that. Are they saving space on corridors so they can have more rooms? Does that make sense? Not sure.

@Andrew_Taylor is that snowman warm-blooded?

@peterrowlett what do you think are the chances of the new site having over 100 posts before it even starts?

Warhammer 40K is 25 years old today! Let's take some time to think about all the nice things we could've bought instead of miniatures.

I have the coolest friends: we're doing exercises from the 1811 arithmetic textbook on my coffee table blackboard.

@pkrautz thanks!

@Samuel_Hansen is complimentary therapy the kind of thing where you go into a little room and everyone tells you how great you are?

This is a bit odd matematikkoyu.org/en/village

it looks like @Samuel_Hansen is riding the crest of a wave bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-…

@alexbellos please use your mastery of the English language to coin a name for puzzles I've seen before but have forgotten the solution to

@alexbellos because I've seen that one before and I want to use a word with lots of plosives in it to describe my frustration

could this be easier? "All proposals must be completed using the MS Word template from the site, converted to PDF and uploaded to EasyChair"

@Bishnavitch that is an amazing advance in the field of Internet cat pictures. Twelve gold stars and three thumbs up

@standupmaths I'd say 8 is an over-generous score for a kettle with no nearby power outlet

@standupmaths wordpress magic: instead of taking screenshots of tweets, write [twitter URL]; get the URL by clicking on "embed this tweet"

@standupmaths actually, that feature is in the next version of wordpress! Never mind.

@standupmaths well then, could you set the image's alt text to the tweet's content so that it's screen-readable?

ARG I was going to put my dinner on an hour ago so it'd be ready when I was hungry but I didn't and now I'm hungry and ARG

@peterrowlett a celebration of British culture

how closely do your shopping lists match brand names? Mine: "washy; bath squish; squash; scrubbers..."

Unilever: I will use your brand names on my shopping list for a small consideration

@JSlayerUK never mind the sexism, that burger looks completely rank

@RANIELDANSON what happened to the sunshine warming your mood?

@pkrautz mega-gimmicky. They never say why a Penrose tiling is suitable. They certainly don't make use of aperiodicity.

@stecks @MathsJam does MK have a meeting-place or organiser? I'll update the map when they do

@outofthenorm2 according to who?

@pkrautz @Gelada yeah, opposite - think of how many ways you can put squares next to each other. Penrose tiles deliberately have fewer ways

@pkrautz @Gelada they're not using anywhere near enough tiles to get the Penrose effect - might as well use any shape with acute angles.

My blog recently passed 4000 all-time hits. That isn't very many!

@peterrowlett October last year. But I got a negligible number of hits before then.

@peterrowlett yeah, it's alright. My mum told me at the weekend in a worried voice that I am very ambitious.

data on every character in unicode. @standupmaths might just lose his reason over this: graphemica.com/%E2%88%83

@brittneybean I've been avoiding thatt because I had an issue of Cabinet to read. Finished that on the metro today. Oh dear.

@standupmaths I've made a Python script to do the happification graph up to 1000. gist.github.com/1939254

@standupmaths I'm redoing it so the edges don't overlap, but that apparently takes FOREVER in graphviz. Maybe it'll be done when I get home

@walkingrandomly I think our economists use it. They use it because it's what they were taught and they are incurious beings

@outofthenorm2 good point

@Andrew_Taylor has one proposed to you?

@peterrowlett you're extremely close to your 8888th tweet. I suggest you make it something in Chinese about the virtues of palindromes

I've been followed by a spambot with a not completely unreasonable picture (though still a pretty girl). Beginning to doubt reality.

@Graphviz @standupmaths here you go: raw.github.com/gist/1939254/8…

@peterrowlett you total rapscallion

@Graphviz @standupmaths behold! I think this took my laptop just over 50 minutes: somethingorotherwhatever.com/happify.png

@stecks ow that was hard to parse. I have brain cramp.

@Bishnavitch this brings up a good question! Where do your farts go?

@peterrowlett @SpencerTHughes Spencer Hughes, you've made an enemy.

this has been me recently: 27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lymnjex…

@RANIELDANSON anagram: Faster Mech. That would be loads better.

images des mathématiques has posted a very good (and long) summary of recent maths news images.math.cnrs.fr/Revue-de-press… (cc @peterrowlett @stecks)

@ColinTheMathmo your cafe-based generosity is increasing at an amazing rate. I must make sure to be in the same city as you at some point.

@Samuel_Hansen that song is part of a trio of creepy girl songs. The other two: "I'll Kill Her" by Soko, "Boyfriend" by Best Coast.

@Samuel_Hansen she has just released an album which I'm undecided about. "I'll Kill Her" is a modern classic, though.

just had my first Newcastle undergrad email to ask about MathsJam. There is hope for this institution yet!

@alexbellos write 1 in cell A1. In cell A2, write "=A1+1". Selected cells A2:A1000. Press Ctrl+D

just read a comment by someone saying IE has excellent developer tools. I agreed so much my computer went out the window.

@Electrokittie @ellenirites also to stop tweeting about "tactical whiteys". As a teetotaller, I'd rather not even know that exists.

@outofthenorm2 my first year number theory lecturer used to do these tricks with stats from the end of Doom levels

@Electrokittie that is the opposite of what will happen

@outofthenorm2 oh! except he used continued fractions to get the answer a lot quicker

@jjsanderson @standupmaths I was amazed last night that I could still see it as far south as Peterlee

@daveowhite how bad? early 3dfx cards, or even PowerVR?

aw, this is a lovely idea goodgym.org

@daveowhite ouch. Suggest you use the Rumble Pak.

@E_I_W what time will you be in the pub?

@E_I_W excellent, that's when I finish at maths-aid. Mind if I join you?

@E_I_W well that sounds sinister!

@HilariousCow hey! That looks just like the original NPRQuake!

@E_I_W I'm on my way. There in five minutes

@peterrowlett almost exclusively wikipedia. Mathworld when I want a second opinion

@Gelada @haggismaths is this inverse kinematics + control theory?

@peterrowlett @stecks hooray! The site that doesn't exist yet has 100 posts. I'm itching to get started.

@Gelada @haggismaths all of them confusing to me. I would be a games programmer now if I'd been able to get my head round it

WHY DO I ALWAYS FORGET GUACAMOLE NEEDS LIME?!?! Now I have to go to the shops.

it's not like there's a catchy song with the recipe or anything youtube.com/watch?v=kRlqsv…

85% homemade hippy-dippy fajitas. Definitely put enough chillies in.

if I am elected, I pledge an end to the boom-and-bust weather systems of the current Tory government

SO COLD

It's March the Turd! The day when people try to do a poo while walking. I love old English traditions.

@standupmaths missing a trick, dude: leave your front door clopen. Burglars will be unable to break in, because there is no "in".

Be broadband is down! O woe, I will have to go outside and enjoy the beach.

Caught out in the rain! Where's my @mathsinthecity umbrella?

@enoFsamohT like all traditions, it's as real as you make it

Physicists: this (double!) rainbow is slightly bigger than my camera's field of view. Moving won't help, right?

@peterrowlett oi, I am expecting an email from you about talk dates

@peterrowlett hey, it worked, didn't it?

@jjsanderson I couldn't see it. Is it because I'm colourblind?

@Talithin gosh, am I famous?

@Talithin if you download that file again, you'll get the finished thing. It was my 4th year project

@Talithin oof, you're doing proper maths.

@Bishnavitch I can give you a lift after the film I'm seeing tonight

@Bishnavitch but you'd have to get the metro back

I wish this was a real article that had been edited and had references and no unsupported claims open.salon.com/blog/annie_kee…

@aperfect alfa rofail. alfail romeo. awful romeo. alfa roamy-no. alfa roh-me-oh-my. half-a romeo.

@benkenyon it's certainly better than the awful French narration / poetry

this film is excellent. I saw it at the Lumiere museum in Lyon. Each frame was hand-coloured. youtube.com/watch?feature=…

To some, programming can be addictive, like a drug. That's why I use Haskell.

@Htbaa no side-effects. It is a terrible pun.

@stecks my speakers were too loud! you are echoey all the way through

@HEAcademy clicking on the "book on this event" button for my event (heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/…) gives a big long database error

@HEAcademy to wit (abbrv): Drivers error '80004005'
SQL Server does not exist or access denied
/LM/W3SVC/1956424472/Root/global.asa, line 27

sometimes jQuery is too helpful and I worry it will one day demand its pound of flesh

My cousin answered one of those facebook trick-arithmetic questions wrong. Disinherited.

What's the most efficient way to cut parallelograms out of a square?

A maths lecturer's best-of clips: youtube.com/watch?v=l789l6…

@WhiteGroupMaths good enough. Have you seen MathJax (mathjax.org) - get typeset maths on your page without using images.

@somerandomdude what attribution text do you want for the Iconic set? I can't find a set phrase on the site.

I've spent too long photographing a bookcase. Please at least agree with me about how excellent my taste is flickr.com/photos/christi…

I've updated my "How to get MathJax on your blog" post with instructions on getting MathJax to work with Disqus: checkmyworking.com/2012/01/how-to…

has anyone read "Euclid in the Rainforest"? amazon.com/Euclid-Rainfor… @nulibsage has just acquired it, I might take it out

@standupmaths the headline "Back on the sheep's back" is not doing your homeland any favours.

@eAssess and me and @NclNumbas !

Currently rewriting this crime against typists into more friendly language.

We're gonna need a bigger brace

@Bishnavitch my friend @Samuel_Hansen has just interviewed him! blog.samuelhansen.com/post/188718312…

@aperfect aw man I just lost the scone game. Now I want one too.

I miss the old Pukka Pad paper. You can hardly ever get a clean tear from the new kind.

Just fell over. All this thinking seems to have drained the blood out of my legs. Clearly not match-fit.

@peterrowlett shockingly, I don't have one in my esoterica collection! Appalled at myself.

@Samuel_Hansen you're getting faster, not slower like I was expecting. I thought you'd turn up on a canal boat next.

this video is ENORMOUSLY pleasing. youtube.com/watch?v=FQMO6v…

Pourquoi devient-on mathématicienne? rts.ch/video/decouver… and she seems to be a geometric group theorist!

@JSlayerUK the universe wants you to sit and twiddle your thumbs for a bit

@elinoroberts that's a very Pocahontas attitude

too clever, google! Search for "zip file mime type". I thought this kind of categorical expert system was abandoned in the 90s?

@brittneybean adverts? Ticketmaster handling fee for the Christmas party?

@brittneybean hey, at least if those catch on they'll be accurate. Look what the mackems are trying to promote: sunderlandsoftwarecity.com/home.html

@brittneybean hahahahaha I've just looked at their twitter and it's full of events happening in Newcastle

@ellenirites a lion tamer. Isn't it obvious?

@Samuel_Hansen @peterrowlett let me try. Is this your interview with Neil deGrasser Tyson? weknowmemes.com/2011/11/watch-…

@christianp @Samuel_Hansen @peterrowlett who is Neil deGrasser Tyson? Maybe a relative of F Scott Snitchgerald

Wow, hmv still exists! And there are people inside! And they're not *all* old women buying presents!

it's taken 26 years, but I think I'm ready to start loving mustard

You don't have to have a smile on your face to work here, but these piggies can fix that

@GhostMutt not going near it

yazoo is basically brown water. What's the point?

@stecks how did you get on with the video? Should I do it?

wherein @stecks uses a zero-knowledge protocol to prove she's better at sudoku than I am: youtube.com/watch?v=i0sffX…

@stecks windows live movie maker is a blunt instrument. At least we know what to do next time

iphone/wordpress people: is there a way to send a link from the browser or twitter directly to a wordpress blog as a draft post?

the spambots have outwitted twitter by changing their names to /x(firstname)\d{4}/ instead of /(firstname)X\d{4}/. Modern-day Einsteins!

@RANIELDANSON smart trousers too! Is Ranson going up in the world?

@JSlayerUK did you watch that thing on bbc four, then?

@JSlayerUK bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01…

I reject this applause-sound completely. There is no way that many people wanted to attend a recording of Brain of Britain.

@pkrautz @danaernst it's CC, not open-source.

@danaernst @pkrautz there are mathematica notebook versions of the chapters on the wiki, so maybe they're the source, but I can't load them

@brittneybean is this something to do with conspicuously throwing out your LPs of next year's hot new pop act?

@brittneybean sorry, I'm trying to write an entertaining maths article. My mind is jammed in "try too hard" mode.

@GPRPichot @pkrautz @stecks @mathblogging sorry, try going straight to youtube: youtube.com/watch?feature=… - my blog has occasional DNS problems

@Andrew_Taylor yeah, word order: "up to 16 killed by soldier" is less ambiguous

@RichardWiseman consider it an affirmation of your respect for your heritage. He'll like that.

@GPRPichot thanks. NP just says a solution can be checked quite quickly - being able to check at all is enough for random guessing to work

@monsoon0 does it work well? We have a similar thing called MAGIC but it's pretty much universally disliked

@GPRPichot twitter doesn't really have enough space to get into the subtleties of it.

@EliotBall I'm skeptical. Is it by design?

The Aperiodical is back! Brit-aping, useless formulae, arts and crafts, interactive proof and parking constants: aperiodical.com/2012/03/aperio…

@peterrowlett @Samuel_Hansen chalk up another win for ol' cp. #mathmaths

A trail of sweets on the pavement. I'm tempted to follow it, but I know there'll just be a messy child at the end of it

@gingerbeardman implying a spammer somewhere died at their keyboard. What a sad thought!

@trackinthebox "Happy Soup" isn't upcoming: it already upcame - amazon.co.uk/Happy-Soup-Exp…

@nulibsage I met one of the photographers in that book while out looking for the aurora at tynemouth! I don't know his name, though.

"we relabel the $i$th letter $w_k$." Does nobody check PhD theses?

@peterrowlett what news?

@peterrowlett ah, Durham's joined. My mind: not blown.

@gingerbeardman great, now my google adverts are going to be full of that Ruark radio for the next month. So expensive!

@aperiodical well, that didn't work, whoever posted that

forget about Pi Day tomorrow, today is March's first Unambiguous Day: While 12/3 could be 12th Mar or 3rd Dec, 13/3 can only be today!

@standupmaths is "avoid all things which increase risk of death" a good strategy? A greedy algorithm, if you will.

this BLT is way more than the sum of its parts, or even the product of its parts. This BLT is more than the tetration of its parts!

@TimandraHarknes @standupmaths could I outsource the worrying, and blindly accept the advice of a third party?

it is very cruel of Mai Lan to release this excellent demo and have nothing downloadable! soundcloud.com/mai-lan/easy-d…

3 in 20 women are on a FTSE 100 board: "The percentage of women on the boards of the UK's 100 largest firms has risen to a record 15.6%"

@aperfect yes, it is good

I had a huge BLT and a litre of fruit (I think that's how big my bowl is) for lunch. How am I still hungry?

@brittneybean what happened to e-s-p-r-e-s-s-o.com? It's serving all sorts of nonsense now

@HoeJodgkiss you only said that so somebody could call you a PDF-phile, right?

@outofthenorm2 I'm going to make a comment, but I also have editorial comments; where would you like those? email?

@standupmaths oh my god, is that a temple of NOD?

Yes!!! We've reached the future! Let's invade mars! youtube.com/watch?v=6ydeY0…

@alexbellos quite interesting. It reminded me of the way the computer/girl Max spoke in Monday's Dirk Gently.

tomorrow: Hypatia (she stoned to death by the monks for the thinking-while-being-a-woman) explains astronomy in London: bbc.co.uk/thingstodo/act…

sorry, most of the last tweet was inaccurate: Hypatia flayed alive by lay Christians; astronomers explain Rachel Weisz as Hypatia in "Agora"

@peterrowlett @SecondRateMinds oh no! image maths! eesh!

@peterrowlett @SecondRateMinds and some of the things there were new to me: can you add citations?

@plusmathsorg oh, bravo! What a genteel, well-mannered pun.

@brittneybean I believe California has some experience with the concept of the "company town", yes.

@peterrowlett the desk calculator used by Ferguson

@peterrowlett nooooo way! Shanks was from where I'm from! houghtonlespring.org.uk/articles/willi…

Is the world path-connected?

@peterrowlett maybe, but to follow through logically I should do it on the wrong day

@charliesgames first thought: quaternions are what you want. I have code at github.com/christianp/war…. Busy at the moment.

@charliesgames but this kind of thing is exactly what hardware T&L is meant to do, I think. Ask an OpenGL person.

@sciencefest is there a way to link to a single event on the website? Trying to tell my mum about the gaze aversion talk tomorrow

@ScienceFest but that doesn't have the description!

@charliesgames can't you use opengl's rotation functions? morrowland.com/apron/tutorial…

@charliesgames then I'm stumped, sorry. I'm no good at optimisations, we don't do those in real maths :)

@charliesgames oh! Is this all happening in 2d?

@charliesgames right. I am very busy at the moment, but remind me this evening if you're still having trouble

a roguelike on hyperbolic space! roguetemple.com/z/hyper.php (via @haggismaths)

@MathsJam a link to mathsjam.com just came up in the "sponsored links" section of my gmail. How odd! Surely nobody is buying adwords

@standupmaths you should get into sage notebook: sagenb.org I'll see if I can do that plot after talk+cakes afternoon here at NCL

@outofthenorm2 @standupmaths that chart, with a log-10 vertical axis, might show no. of digits correct better

oh! just noticed @peterrowlett linked digits of pi to the first person to calculate them in his post travels.peterrowlett.net/2012/03/happy-…

@yomcat @peterrowlett @Samuel_Hansen honestly, MathJax is dead dead easy. There's a wordpress plugin. wordpress.org/extend/plugins…

@standupmaths I prefer to write pi in base-26^9 and write the first digit as "christian"

@standupmaths gosh, I had an odd moment of tweet-blindness where I thought you said to look for your name. Same method works, anyway

I'm so enormously happy with myself for remembering to put the garlic bread in the oven. For once, pasta night is proper!

@RachaelBailes you should hear the outrageous things my colleague has to say about the humanities

wahey, 304 followers! See if you can get that up to 314 before pi day is over

I'm watching videos of animals embarrassing themselves. So far I've watched two dolphins collide mid-air and a hippo with terrible diarrhoea

@peterrowlett nobody is going to misinterpret 3/14 as referring to the 3rd of Mega-February

@PatParslow @peterrowlett @timtfj that's it, I'm measuring dates using radians from now on. I will celebrate pi day halfway through July 1st

@timtfj @PatParslow @peterrowlett um.. why?

yes!! thank you windows update! my bluetooth chip works again! now the speakers I bought to replace my unusable speakers are usable again!

how many chocolate traybakes can I prevent myself from cooking before the one I have to make next wednesday? Chocobrain has been activated

artsters: can any of you explain the current fad for geometric shapes?

amazon reviewer trying very hard with his first three sentences to come across as the kind of person I don't like: amazon.co.uk/review/R3RJB3L…

the closest shop selling an avocado after 5 is not in walking distance. I thought Tynemouth was meant to be posh?

@brittneybean at least we're not being referred to as "matériel" yet

now I know for definite that licking the spoon you measured the cayenne pepper with is a bad idea

@outofthenorm2 great stuff!

@Bishnavitch archer series 3: Wednesday, 10pm, 5*.

@ColinTheMathmo yeesh. We're a long way from my campaign for 0 to be a natural number to gain any traction, then.

$\int_0^e \left( e^{e^{e^{e^{e^x}}}}.e^{e^{e^{e^x}}}.e^{e^{e^x}}.e^{e^x}.e^x \right) dx = ^6e - ^5e$. Why? pic.twitter.com/SbLRIi4D

(sorry, took me a while to get the TeX right there)

@outofthenorm2 fun fact

how is this "Lost Cities of the Ancients" programme on bbc four? It's barely good enough for channel five.

@peterrowlett you missed out Katie's Manchester MathsJam recap from the math/maths show notes! aperiodical.com/2012/03/mathsj…

2^10 comments on my blog! Only 89.8% of which are spam!

@elinoroberts which printer?

@ben_nuttall so their servers can literally be taken down by The Man?

@peterrowlett that looks like a very good booklet

Newcastle @MathsJam is tomorrow, 7pm, the Charles Grey. mathsjam.com/index.php?cont… @peterrowlett will be joining us, so look smart!

@brittneybean that is lacking a lot of nuance

@brittneybean argrgrsgr, the more I read about that visualisation, the more angry it makes me

this visualisation of the wrong data has made me angry: guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/…. Typing with clenched fists is hard so no thanks @brittneybean

@aperfect @brittneybean precisely. checkmyworking.com/2012/03/visual…

@peterrowlett it's practically summer up here. Hope you packed shorts! Dragons currently in Sunderland, so you'll be fine.

This might not be very healthy

@standupmaths should I be updating the MathsJams map with your van's coordinates?

@TuringSunflower can you explain the link between Turing and sunflowers please? Is it to do with reaction-diffusion and that sort of thing?

@MathsJam GLA: we meant you need only one of the first two steps, ie 2332 is a solution

@christianp @MathsJam or even 3223 would make more sense to you! Forgot which way round you had it

I like this a big lot: thisiscolossal.com/2012/03/clouds…

@HESTEM thanks! I should've given @peterrowlett some in a doggy bag, there's loads left over (turns out we didn't need TWO kilos of cake)

plan for tomorrow: sit in pyjamas and write code until all my problems are solved

@trackinthebox why don't your URLs have the date in them? Isn't that sort of the idiom within which your site operates?

@brittneybean but if it was in the url I'd be able to tell if a link is to today's track or an old one.

we are running a workshop on creating maths OER on April the 10th, for which places are still available: heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/…

@charliesgames and that is why I don't play shmups. Did you sort out your rotation thing?

Oh no! It's the Simpsons episode with the Run Lola Run spoof but I missed that bit. Truly life is not worth living!

Dinner tonight: a traditional Mexican dish, "throw all one's spices and vegetables at a few bowls"

ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ

@stecks oh! I get it now!

@stecks can we make a script which takes arxiv papers and replaces every proof with "Left as an exercise for the reader"?

I wanted to live by the sea, not in it!

@peterrowlett @aperiodical ahh, I thought I fixed that! I wonder where the correct version is

@peterrowlett @aperiodical should be fixed now

@RANIELDANSON I wondered this, because my (southern, manchester) flatmates had never heard of it. I thought it was used everywhere

Bison! In Sedgefield! At Farnless Farm Park.

more bison pictures at plus.google.com/11130061692066…

Gosh, @peterrowlett has been doing a very good job writing up news stories for our new site aperiodical.com today.

@peterrowlett I added a bit of mathematical detail in a comment to the topic-based vector space story.

haha! 30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1c9yeu…

a clever way of switching between markup and its display, including with LaTeX: youtube.com/watch?v=hG3ELs…

A page from an old notebook. When was I good at drawing?!

yeesh. I've just discovered a library that makes my instant-preview-above-TeX editor a squillion times simpler: somethingorotherwhatever.com/new-writemaths/

today has started with a good photo gardenofpraise.com/agbell13.htm

please buy my new range of plates featuring images of the abyss, a navel, the circle of life and the night sky: "ContemPlates"

other ill-considered crockery: the Grand Bowl Opry, Dish is The End, Camilla Finger-Bowls

@peterrowlett time to forward you all those funny cat pictures I've been saving

@jcoglan a first attempt: dict['a'] = dict.get('a',0). I feel there's a slightly more obvious way though

@christianp @jcoglan in fact, two lines lower in the docs: dict.setdefault('foo',0). docs.python.org/library/stdtyp…

@jcoglan that's what setdefault does. get doesn't set it.

@jcoglan oh, I see what you mean. Never mind.

windows 7 non-powershell command line: is there a way to pipe a wildcard selection of files through to a command?

@PencilBloke it's the best kind of correct: technically correct

@jcoglan this (neckbeardy) command just occurred to me: ``` python -c "help(dict)" | grep default ```

@jjsanderson eduroam is an agreement between universities so visitors can use their home institution account info to get wifi anywhere

@stecks "Blackboard Bold" is an excellent name for a column

This is just excellent: "The mate-in-n problem of infinite chess is decidable" jdh.hamkins.org/the-mate-in-n-… (via @mathblogging)

@jcoglan I tried to cross "inception!" with "examination" but all I got was "incemination!" and that is another kind of dream entirely

Using inline SVG in HTML is an enormous faff. Am I missing something?

Matt's code loves him!

@fumbleweeds wow, you would *not* get on well in the UK

The new metro trains have a space for wheelchair users which this wheelchair user is not using because her carer can't sit next to her.