Tweets from 2015

I've seen a lot of weird Swiss music videos, but this is definitely the weirdest yet youtu.be/d-Q-_NUHfKE

@evelynjlamb I noticed that too! Weird

@JanvierUK all we need now is a game of baccarat to get out of hand

Instructions on this bottle of squash say to mix 1 part squash with 4 parts water. Wouldn't that be ridiculously strong?

I found a new integer sequence! Numbers with palindromic representations in more than one base oeis.org/A253594

@JanvierUK Robinson's, not double concentrate or no added sugar

For some reason, this time I tried to install and run ipython notebook, it worked. Hooray!

@treasa On windows with python2.7, I did `pip install "ipython[notebook]"` and it just worked. I wonder if a dependency has been removed

@jgrahamc clicked the cloudflare button in mediatemple admin, got confused, gave up

MATHMO MEME MEMO: φ has not been renewed as the ubiquitous maths concept. This year, Rényi's parking constants will be everywhere instead.

Featuring code by me, CP! RT @MathJax: MathJax 2.5-beta is out! mathjax.org/mathjax-v2-5-b…

@peterrowlett Um, yes? I saw that as well.

@lyd_w how inconsiderate! I always make sure to include the web postcode

@JSEllenberg something to do with \lesseqgtr? zvon.org/comp/r/ref-Mat…

The US used to measure its computing power in 'kilo-girls' theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

@JanvierUK happy birthday!

@plusmathsorg 2015's hot moustache trend?

This is not Babar! WHAT. IS. THIS.

@samholloway really? I thought the only other one was in windsor

@walkingrandomly bamboo paper

@scienceatlife LMS local heroes lms.ac.uk/grants/localhe… you should do a thing about William Shanks, the chap who calculated lots of pi digits

@scienceatlife oh man, I've just seen that applications closed in November. Oh well!

@RichardElwes @aperiodical I'm not

@stecks @RichardElwes @aperiodical if I'd planned Christiansmas better, I'd be in London for the LMS thing followed by the @FOTSN DVD show

@stecks @RichardElwes @aperiodical instead, I'm going to be at home here in The North, eating pancakes with my friends

@RichardElwes if you're going, and the fancy takes you, could you write a report for @aperiodical?

@RichardElwes super, thanks! Email it to root@aperiodical.com

@jgrahamc that's the kind of thinking that underlies those "I can feed a family of 30 on 50p a week!" articles - bulk discounts

Would you spot that the first of these is not the same as the second, if you came across it in text? checkmyworking.com/misc/makebigma…

@icecolbeveridge me too - I'm proofreading someone else's stuff

@Andrew_Taylor Chucky

Weird. "Math Rock Star": the Srinivasa Ramanujan app - play.google.com/store/apps/det…

10 mathsy fabrics blog.spoonflower.com/2015/01/announ… (via @CarnivalOfMath)

Well done 2tall.com for sending me a shirt that actually fits my ridiculous Mr Tickle arms!

@samholloway yeah, it's much <<buffering...>>

@evelynjlamb I prefer "nuclear miso panic"

@ChrisHazell72 glad to help!

@JanvierUK thanks :)

a bit concerned that a foreign exchange company I've never dealt with sent me an email saying "surprise, we remembered your birthday!"

It's 12:46 - let's all dial the Bahamas!

@mike_geogebra not sure I'd be any use helping test, but I'd like to know how you're doing it!

@nclroblib

@walkingrandomly same thing happened to our old computing guy. He went with "offended"

@peterrowlett ta!

@MrHonner @stevenstrogatz do you both know about this: arxiv.org/abs/1202.3033 ?

Ooh, this is good: queries Wolfram Alpha can't answer - @wacnt

This is new to me: freemium e-assessment for schools. Free in-school, but pay to allow access at home. Not sure how I feel about that

@jjaron yeah, they were way off with the original

I've bought a pukka pad for the first time in a few years. They've gone back to the stiff paper that tears properly! Hooray!

@Bishnavitch no. Not enough teal.

@peterrowlett ooh, I'm free! Thanks for reminding me

@jgrahamc all that matters is that your hips tell the truth

The blackbird is named for the male of the species #everydaysexism

My laptop is now the coolest laptop, thanks to @GeoBunnies

@Bishnavitch have you seen youtube.com/watch?v=o27rxQ… ?

@Bishnavitch Helen says she sees your Stars in Their Eyes and raises you two episodes of Poirot

Could it bee? @aperiodical

@jjaron for a while he also had some pretty kooky ideas about who would rule the planet earth

Newcastle @MathsJam is TONIGHT, 7pm at the Charles Grey pub. Don't tell anyone, but I've got Dobble.

@samholloway (not really) OH in the computer science department: "FizzBuzz just got a lot harder!"

@jamesgrime ooh, an argument about the true meaning of a phrase! That's where I'm a viking!

@robeastaway @Gelada @icecolbeveridge after 50 rounds using a computer random number generator, I'm winning 20-17. Don't think it's cheating

@DanielColquitt annoying in healthy people, but some people have bad knees and arthritis and so on

@icecolbeveridge ... and I've just updated the MathsJam map with your new location

sudden flashback to making random landscapes with Perlin noise in DarkBasic. Gosh.

Teenagers have violated a law of physics: the concentration of Lynx in the air on this train is greater than the concentration in the can

Ooh, just created question 7000 on the @NclNumbas public editor. It does clever things with polynomials! numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/question/7000/…

@icecolbeveridge @MathsJam I see your one side and all angles, and raise you one side and TWO angles

"100% chicken breast". I wonder how the bacon feels about that.

@icecolbeveridge @nillie_kj huh? No, I was just planning on writing C=180-A-B and getting on with my day

@robinhouston in what way? I can see a couple of problems

@robinhouston ok. It also goes down between 2005 and 2008. And which average do they use for CEO pay? And why $ versus £? etc etc and so on

@robinhouston "read more" says "even proportionally, there has been almost no improvement in poverty rates in sub-Saharan Africa since 1981"

@haggismaths aaa I want to play!

You know that sandwich I tweeted about at lunchtime? It is now making me pay for my insolence.

What I'm trying to say is:

Poopin'.

@TimHarford I certainly agree with the headline.

Cool kids don't link directly to the PDF form of an arXiv preprint

@kenfodder code, or prose?

Recently we switched to a brand of bread whose slices don't have reflection symmetry. This has had bad consequences for our sandwiches

@semiBad I sometimes shush command line tools

@Gelada Butter both slices. Add filling on one, flip other and put it on top. Solved by flipping one first, or not buttering both sides

@samholloway what about Qs F,G and H?

And now, some Tiny Drawings of Times of Old

1. A stick and hoop, abandoned after the invention of computer games.

Q

2. One snowman painting another snowman's portrait

8A 8

@ben_nuttall can I do a twitter pull request? s/'lol'*i/'l'+'ol'*i/

@mutedestro huh? You prefer linking directly to the pdf?

@mathcentre thanks, but this is very much a personal account. Can you please mention @NclNumbas instead?

Going to assume the fact my DSL has gone down is linked to the digger outside. There's some shouting.

This DIY coat stand is the absolute worst. Measuring 120° was solved literally millennia ago!

@chris_a_wagner SkewGender is the one you really want

@jjaron his birthday could be between now and May

@jgrahamc braille numbers don't have a check digit?!

@bitcraftlab @jamesgrime I'm not sure about that.

@RichardElwes and it went straight into the spam folder. Thanks for warning me :)

@mathhombre I'm writing a thing about this for @aperiodical. I have largely the same thoughts

LMS/LMS mashups:
Least Mean Society
Least Mathematical Squares
London Mean Society

Trying to just post a nonsense formula piece without digging into it and cataloguing the many ways it's nonsense. Failing.

The @aperiodical is doing really well with guest posts at the moment. Thanks everyone! And if you've got something to say, send it in!

@peterrowlett sorry...

@peterrowlett but I'm working through the news queue! Pity that my dealing with administrivia produces yet more of it

@NCLMathsStats the Maths Arcade is running again for Semester 2. 12pm every Tuesday in the Herschel foyer. Play games while you eat lunch!

'zeros' or 'zeroes'?

apparently 'zeroes' is more common in America! A rare case of adding a letter english.stackexchange.com/questions/3824…

zeroe. #danquayle

@JanvierUK the BBC programme page only goes up to 5th of Feb. Where else would one find it?

@Derektionary I'll consider that definitive!

@GreyAlien wow, you're really splashing that indie cash

You all think you're so cool, with your links in red and no underline. Well, I'm not clicking on them because I can't see them.

Has anyone compared Apple's record profits to the East India Company? Time for Obama to take them over and become Emperor of Bevelled Edges?

The solution to a question I'm editing just gives the formula for matrix inverse with no proof. Is this too much?

@tynesidecinema not sure if it's appropriate for Valentine's, but Umbrellas of Cherbourg

(I wrote out a derivation, to see if it was the right length to include. This is online, so no need to save paper. Worthwhile?)

@JamesMoosh yeah well, I wrote left-to-right and didn't think about what would happen after

@ashleyhwright oh wow, you're right! Glad I'm not going out for lunch today

Today's notation conundrum: is "5/7" a mathematical expression which must be calculated, or does it represent a number in its own right?

I'm of the opinion that, for example, "10^9" is a thing to be calculated. But I'd almost never write it as "1000000000", so maybe I'm wrong

Maybe the question is: is this how you'd write this number if you referred to it on its own?

@jjaron it's one more than 56.

@jjaron quite!

@icecolbeveridge I think there's (one or more) way of writing a number so you say "I don't have to do any more work, I know what this is"

@icecolbeveridge you're slightly veering away from my question - not "what's the best way of writing it?", but "does it need any more work?"

@infrahumano so my question was: does "5/7" represent an operation, or not?

@AdamCreen I consider a GCSE marking scheme the least authoritative possible source

@AdamCreen yes

ALISTAIR FINISHED HIS BEES POST!!! "@aperiodical: Apiological: mathematical speculations about bees aperiodical.com/?p=7743"

If I wanted to read the three paywalled references in @outofthenorm2's bees post, it'd cost me £107.82. That's too much money.

@MouldS what a muddy dog!

@Andrew_Taylor I think "it" is the benefit from doing the thing

@Andrew_Taylor oh yes, I got it wrong. I had it right in my head before I wrote the tweet.

@Andrew_Taylor anyway, Language Log: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2857

"Four" is an interesting thinky game. I'm sure you can do some graph theory on it piqnt.com/4/four/

@haggismaths something to do with this? arxiv.org/abs/0803.1129 Can't remember exactly what it's about, got the link on my phone

@gingerbeardman that looks AMAZING

@aperfect I was just looking at that photo and thinking how uncool the Ferrari overalls are

@JanvierUK I got about an hour-ish in last night, and he never seemed to actually state his thesis or offer any argument. Just endless facts

@CardColm you could try Teesside?

Just saw the new @MathJax quick first-pass rendering happen on a live page for the first time. Clever!

@nclroblib when I'm on sciencedirect, the library's logo is not showing up - it's trying to load from ncl.ac.uk/library/findit…

@nclroblib that was the point! I was looking at sciencedirect.com/science/articl… and the URL I gave before is where it thinks the logo should be

@nclroblib thanks! Is there an email address I should use for this sort of thing, so it gets to the right people quicker?

Today's test account

@peterrowlett what happens next will BLOW YOUR MIND

@peterrowlett next week's lecture: the 27 craziest roots of unity

@samholloway @peterrowlett hey, I don't believe in the axiom of choice. You can't put a well-ordering on the complex numbers!

@icecolbeveridge @aperiodical there's a use for astrolabes too, but I don't carry one with me

brb, pitching my new weekly knockout format "Test of the d'Urbevilles" to ITV. Celebs compete to out-emosh each other

all I want for christmas is a terminal that can output a unicode snowman

@sxpmaths hey, where did 7B go?

@peterrowlett whooooops! Fixed.

The Liverpool Echo has a pancake day countdown clock. I approve MOST HEARTILY liverpoolecho.co.uk/whats-on/whats…

@matheknitician that got me thinking about the best dimensions for a grid of n! squares. It's this OEIS sequence: oeis.org/A200743

@Andrew_Taylor boo to that!

@scienceatlife what, @edyong209 is a permanent installation now?

Mojibake: the mess resulting from decoding text using the wrong encoding en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

The TinyMCE documentation is terrible. So many undocumented options!

@mikeandallie it works! geogebratube.org/student/m626989

@SLSingh @TomChivers @walkingrandomly I have this body horror just about every other day while brushing my teeth.

@BenTormey I just removed your marking account from NESS. Sad.

I've just finished Odd Bot Out by semi-acquaintance @MartinMagni - oddbotout.com. It's a fun physics puzzler with a cute robot

@stecks @mcrgirlgeeks but what about AstROFLs? Will they be available as well?

Another day, another test user

@samholloway surely Teicester

@HiFikidsDotCom you probably won't reach too many of the people you want at #mathsjam - it's for adults who are already good at maths!

@ColinTheMathmo I've just realised this is The Tale Of How You Get To Newcastle. How late will you be?

“I’m Autistic, And Believe Me, It’s A Lot Better Than Measles” by Sarah Kurchak medium.com/the-archipelag…

@icecolbeveridge something something cardinality of the unit interval

@C_J_Smith @aperiodical @Independent oh, PR fluff for @FryRsquared's new book. No disapproval: working shown, formula is really a formula

@C_J_Smith also Betteridge's law: the answer to their question is "no".

@C_J_Smith @FryRsquared the best I could find on the arXiv is this: The Local Bubble, Local Fluff, and Heliosphere arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9…

Oh dear: the @makerfaire_uk is the weekend of @aperfect's wedding. Tough choice.

In javascript, if you try to call `o.fn(b())`, where o doesn't have the property `fn`, b() is still evaluated anyway codepen.io/christianp/pen…

Just submitted a "base,dumb,easy" sequence to the OEIS. This is how I choose to waste my hours on this earth.

@BrianGenisio cor, that'd be quite something

@BrianGenisio but that doesn't work:
var a={};
function b(){a.q=function(v){console.log('a',v);}; console.log('b'); return 'b'};
a.q(b())

@brittneybean wow! Friday's my day off so I will watch

.@BrianGenisio in Python, an AttributeError (or KeyError) is thrown and the arguments aren't evaluated: gist.github.com/christianp/0a4…

@Derektionary oeis.org/draft/A254898

@icecolbeveridge @ColinTheMathmo yep, and he told me on Monday he can now do the trick on an 8x8 board

@Derektionary Probably. The sequence with 3 on the end is in, and the forwards sequence with no 3 is in, so this completes the set

"For spacial reasons, we cannot allow passengers with dogs to use the service" [a tunnel] - huh? Dogs are smaller than people.

unless "spacial" is a new word

@walkingrandomly (and later on, worry that a significant amount of our computer stuff is all stored on the same privately-held servers)

@walkingrandomly yeah, that's not a problem. But github provides a lot of useful stuff that would be hard to replicate if they disappeared

@leonpalafox @walkingrandomly that's a bit different, because you don't typically keep a local copy of all your emails

@leonpalafox @walkingrandomly I'd say it's more like google reader - they added a lot of value to something that already exists freely

@leonpalafox @walkingrandomly right. And gmail lock-in could turn out to be a problem.

@evelynjlamb group theorists don't want you to know this ONE WEIRD TRICK to decide if a word is trivial!

@lostinrecursion @j_lanier hey, those are the Zeckendorf representations of the natural numbers!

Today's weird maths-inspired product: "MATHEMATICS" scissors designyxr.com/objects/#/math…

@LearningMaths really? I don't get it. More golden ratio nonsense

@LearningMaths oh well, different strokes for different folks

@sxpmaths you'd hope so, but factoring top and bottom is much quicker. "Simplify" is a terrible word

@alexallmont @haggismaths ooh, it looks fun to use: youtube.com/watch?v=58GfWU…

@wilderlab I first saw that in this gif: imgur.com/gallery/VH34C

.@stecks @jamesgrime if anyone can make a gif of the bit where he says "err, modular arithmetic", I'll be eternally thankful

@lostinrecursion ah, whoops!

@standupmaths @phil_mcgeehan isn't that Hypercuba?

@haggismaths I wish I'd bought one when I had the chance. Now they cost big money

@MrHonner @timchartier even better: unicodeit.net

Newcastle @MathsJam isn't happening this month, because tomorrow is pancake day!

@peterrowlett @CardColm he just needs to visit @stecks and he'll be able to fill his Aperiodical autograph book

@brittneybean end that foo(d)

@haggismaths @standupmaths whaaaaaaaaaaat

@coordimategraph do you know your account's been hacked for a couple of weeks now?

My stupidest integer sequence yet is finally published: "read the first n digits of π-3 backwards" oeis.org/A254898

So, what did Father Pancakes bring you?

@icecolbeveridge @florapost1 @MathsJam crikey, that would be difficult with ~30 jams in one timezone. Solve the TSP in each timezone?

@florapost1 @icecolbeveridge @MathsJam huh?

It's as I feared: adding the "re-roll randomised variables until they satisfy this property" feature has made me much slacker

@aperfect cor!

@nclroblib is anyone else complaining about the wifi in the library? It's been terrible here in Maths-Aid since the upgrade

@JanvierUK I like you.

@JanvierUK because you're a good person, and you make me smile. Don't let bad feelings lie to you.

"boo hoo hoo I can't get TikZ to draw my diagram nicely" - try telling that to the author of this: anaphoria.com/meruone.PDF

(Not so) Much Ado About Nothing by Tanya Khovanova and her son tanyakhovanova.com/publications/N…

Googling takes me funny places. The weird ways numerals are written in China - sinosplice.com/life/archives/…

@theoremoftheday that's how I found it

@sophiebauckham "Somehow they made Newbiggin worse"

When you multiply a 1xN matrix by an Nx1 matrix, what do you get: a number, or a 1x1 matrix?

@infrahumano of course, but which one would you say you've got? Or, which would you write?

@jamesgrime @infrahumano jolly good!

@badmachinery oh my! That's even more jolly than Cow Cow Boogie youtube.com/watch?v=8567aN…

My fiancée's good at music but doesn't know how to code; I'm good at code but don't know how to music. Is there a @Sonic_Pi tutorial for us?

@Sonic_Pi I honestly don't know. I have a vague memory of opening Sonic Pi about a year ago and fancy seeing if we can try it together.

@outofthenorm2 I think you mean antcestors

@peterrowlett @C_J_Smith yes! See also: names of unit vectors

@icecolbeveridge @C_J_Smith @shahlock it's not a number, but would you ever lead someone to believe it is with your notation?

@ColinTheMathmo @robeastaway I assumed it was an idiom I'd never heard of

@helenjbradley you might have some success with my deck.js template - write slides in html github.com/christianp/dec…

Hey! This is a tiny horse!

All the people saying "it's a normal horse and you're just too big" - I get enough of that from my girlfriend

@theoremoftheday @peterrowlett @apdox @aperiodical Thompon's group F has been proved amenable and non-amenable multiple times each way

@lyd_w #toosoon m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…

@CardColm it's on its way...

@CardColm I take some umbrage at the implication I'm in the midlands

@tynesidecinema a rare photo from Bleatchley Park!

Monday morning test user

If you're having trouble remembering the numbers, repetition can help. oeis.org/A002264 - integers repeated 3 times

I'm sure the amount of time it takes me to find the "Download full paper as PDF" link on ScienceDirect increases with each visit

@CardColm the local delicacy! If only it was in a stottie

@CardColm I think email problems are rampant! I'll wait at haymarket metro to pick you up

@walkingrandomly you could do it with vagrant fairly easily, but it wouldn't be quick

Just imagine if javascript had a raw string literal like Python's. Just imagine.

Another integer sequence! a(1) = 3; a(n) = read the next a(n-1) decimal digits of pi oeis.org/A255190

The facebook app on my phone has drained my battery in 3 hours. What can it possibly be doing?

Green is having a bad time. #tantrix

After his talk yesterday, @CardColm's book has taken its place on my bookshelf

Dear Americans: your attitude to credit card security is woeful. And also: WHY DON'T YOU TAKE ONLINE RESERVATIONS

Excellent chiasmus in The People's Kitchen's slogan peopleskitchen.co.uk

Friends, I ask you: what do we gain by abbreviating "false" to "flse"? #badcodereview

@CardColm @SHUMaths I've got one! I could've prepped you

@helenarney Mu-vie night

@CardColm by the way, I worked out the four card Fitch Cheney trick

@CardColm eugh.. maybe

@CardColm yeah, I gave up and googled. You mean the time order you put the cards down matters too?

@CardColm looking at the positions of the dark spot as a sequence, it's not in the OEIS (or its mirror)

@CardColm well, I can't do that with my deck!

@CardColm actually it was the ƧIƎO

Does anyone know what the "game of contours" is? I don't have a copy of Winning Ways oeis.org/A006021

@CardColm I'm glad you can see both sides of the matter

@AfarBell @CardColm (back to the seat covers?) each row has two dark spots. Not sure if that means anything.

@walkingrandomly for when you can't be bothered to write a .gitignore?

I get the impression I don't care about my hair enough for my barber's liking.

@MB_Whitworth @aperiodical how did I not catch that? I am very familiar with the Dobble deck. Will fix it.

@wacnt I think it's 12352: gist.github.com/christianp/2db…

@wacnt Possibly some time in October 2006: cloud.sagemath.com/projects/48ea2…

@wacnt 247338 gist.github.com/christianp/911…

@wacnt I reckon "nonsynonymous", or if you don't like the prefix, "monosporous".

@wacnt 1.5240217474538633, or 696577:457065 - gist.github.com/christianp/438…

@wacnt 20976 - gist.github.com/christianp/8cb…

@icecolbeveridge (with a one-hour gap while my dad told me about his house-hunting woes)

@wacnt Afghanistan and China: 3.7899159663865545 (45.1 against 11.9) - gist.github.com/christianp/6f8…

@wacnt 9 - gist.github.com/christianp/8a6…

@wacnt Agadez and Tel Aviv - gcmap.com/mapui?P=AJY-TL…

@wacnt 412.5 miles per hour - 2475 miles over 6 hours (gcmap.com/dist?P=JFK-LAX)

@wacnt I had a good go at this but getting the lines to match up is tricky!

@wacnt 279

@wacnt 7 - gist.github.com/christianp/50b…

@wacnt working: gist.github.com/christianp/4d5…

@CardColm creepiest Beatles tour yet?

@icecolbeveridge early algebra. Italians used 'cosa' to mean the unknown. Germanic mathmos miswrote that as 'coss'.

@icecolbeveridge (I'm currently reading this fascinating book on mathematical notation: press.princeton.edu/titles/10204.h…)

@nillie_kj @icecolbeveridge yes

@divbyzero I'll always remember 17 is a prime number because once there were 17 of us in a PE class and the teacher asked me why it was bad

@aperfect I have to use SAP. You lose.

@stecks what, more than the Hermann the German graphs?

@samholloway @stecks yes, you should see a tweet. What happens when you refresh the page?

@nillie_kj so I was quite far off - that makes it (22/16)*1000*1000*(11/75) = 201667, whereas I got 247337. Hm.

Woohoo! @FOTSN finally persuaded a venue in Newcastle to let them in festivalofthespokennerd.com/around-uk/

@FOTSN I can provide... TWO AUDIENCE MEMBERS!

@FOTSN hm.. I'm a maths one, and I'm bringing a musical girl one... I need a pyromaniac!

This is a terrible way of presenting a statistic

@WoollyBenguin bravo!

No wonder I've stopped getting automated backups: the @aperiodical's MySQL database dump is 350MB!

... which compresses down to 55MB. That's still quite big!

Started writing a 4-page paper. I've written an outline, which I'll fill with text, and it's already 3 pages. Who knew I was so verbose?

@ZaltzCricket they should take a note out of Bernie Ecclestone's book and add sprinklers to the pitch

@jamestanton Yes!

@pkrautz that's actually not bad, and nowhere near the nonsense we get in British papers. It all makes sense!

@Sharpe_Actuary @jamestanton like so

@WoollyBenguin can you write a comment on the post itself?

@Sharpe_Actuary @jamestanton conjecture: that's the best (most dice) you can do

@Sharpe_Actuary @jamestanton I retract that immediately. You can do any curve that never has more than one non-corner die

Exported a bibtex citation from sciencedirect. It contains an unescaped ampersand. How has that not been caught? #addedvalue

Empanadas!

@exitgames_uk @noneatnamesleft that's quite serendipitous because I've been meaning to ask: what's the best exit game near Newcastle?

scrapmaker.com/home - "Useful lists for geeks, machine learning, and linguists."

@tarim8 @standupmaths all you need is a One Direction concert around the corner and you've got the full set

"Username must be 6-8 characters". So I can't use my actual name, then.

Fun game:
1) draw a scribble in detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
2) look at the top match ,and find papers using it at latexsearch.com/home.do

@ruimvieira hm.. how hard would it be to compute frequencies for every symbol used on the arXiv, and for each paper list its rarest symbol?

@ruimvieira it looks like it would cost about $23 to download the entire set of source files.

@ruimvieira I'm currently trying to work out how to actually download it! I can spend $0.12 on a prototype

@ruimvieira I can't log in to AWS account. That's probably for the best - I have a paper to write

@turnipheadpic @TynemouthGossip I assume the photo was taken to record the one time in history parking wasn't a problem on Front Street

@ruimvieira I have something which works in about 1 second on a 60MB dump. Hmm

@ruimvieira the most conventional paper I've got is fr.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/030… - it uses \nu 5 times more than average

@phillord detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

oeis.org is down! HOW WILL I COPE?

Featuring a "puzzle" by me, CP! RT @aperiodical: Puzzlebomb – March 2015 aperiodical.com/?p=13511

Does anyone think 91 euro is a sensible price for an anthology of articles about pi? springer.com/gp/book/978038…

Just a reminder that Legendre defined a constant which was used for 80 years before it was proved to be exactly 1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendre%…

All in favour of calling the first of January Legendre's Day?

@robeastaway the solution is to form a swapping syndicate. I did some similar calculations for football stickers: plus.google.com/+ChristianPerf…

@stevenstrogatz @MoMath1 that link goes to "Page not found" for me

I really like the typography in this maths paper from 1965. nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/… What flavour of hipster am I now?

@C_J_Smith there's an extremely popular pub near us that has the same setup. I have no idea how they get away with it!

@C_J_Smith yeah, but I've only been there once, at someone else's birthday party

Spend 10m writing code to find a Metro route which sees all vowels in station names: output is two adjacent stations gist.github.com/christianp/b9f…

@jjsanderson so that hit's answer is "carefully"?

@johndavidread while looking for data, I found this paper which might prompt another series from @outofthenorm2 beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/12/6/6…

A slightly obscure test user today (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_B…)

@katemath For similar reasons, the "Send" button in email should be relabelled "Begin the process of proofreading"

Best King name ever: Ladislaus the Posthumous en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladislaus…

I intend to become Christian the Rejected on Technical Grounds, the First

@tim_hunt As far as I can see, we're at around 350,000 for Numbas, since Sep 2012. A different scale!

@Simon_Gregg @benorlin I can't think how I'd explain it any simpler than the wikipedia page does. It's a moderately-tough concept

@CardColm do you mean, a sequence of (ball hit by white, balls potted) ?

@CardColm that'd be a fascinating problem to run a computer vision algorithm on recordings of snooker matches

Mmm!

@ajkiddle ShortLex order! (but also patriarchy)

@ajkiddle gender fields should be freeform-entry, anyway

Ran out of hot chocolate powder, had to use cocoa. Unsure if I'm getting my fix.

Exactly a month until I become Mr Lawson-Perfect. Exciting!

Le livre de l'incompletude is still too incomplete even to publish an ebook. Submit some formulas for the numbers 0-9 incompletude.com

@irks5 it's only using javascript to check the formulas, so all sorts of overflows and other errors can happen

@irks5 I suppose the link with Gödel is to do with the completeness of formal systems...

@irks5 ...it's just a shame that the rules they've got give a complete consistent system (I think)

@nclroblib maybe he's an urban wizard? vimeo.com/27832247

GitHub makes it really easy to fix typos in open source software. Just submitted a pull request for a one-character change to STACK

@TimHarford it looks like you've got a photo credit in there with no photo ("fortune teller with crystal ball")

@futurebird it's a good way of communicating the name you prefer to be called by, which isn't often the same as the one in the From header

@outofthenorm2 @aperiodical still time for you to get a post in

Well, I was planning on having a productive morning writing posts for the @aperiodical, but it is TOO COLD TO TYPE

#teachthecontroversy

@icecolbeveridge @aperiodical yep! Stick it on the site

oop, I'd better do something with that novelty domain name I bought. #firstworldproblems

@icecolbeveridge \[ and \]

@icecolbeveridge but don't worry about that kind of stuff - I'll run through it and tidy to my liking when you're done

@icecolbeveridge ta! Might look at it today, depending on how my other stuff goes

@standupmaths (still being worked on)

@peterrowlett @standupmaths indeed!

@standupmaths well, that's my wedding decorations sorted

@Andrew_Taylor @ben_nuttall @standupmaths oh yes, that's the other thing I was going to do! Whoops

@Andrew_Taylor @ben_nuttall @standupmaths try now

@ben_nuttall @Andrew_Taylor something something unicode. Hang on...

@aPaulTaylor oh, that's very good!

@aPaulTaylor that one made sense for the first episode - "The Supersizers Go Edwardian" - because Edwardians ate so much

It's pile day, right? Here's my ironing pile. #pileday

someone think of a Greek or German compound word for when you expect tab-completion to work on mkdir

I've added a little explanation to three.onefouronefivenine.com

@peterrowlett it's in my autocomplete now 😉

@ColinTheMathmo @standupmaths I'd guess most of the inaccuracy is in using the stopwatch.

@peterrowlett hmm... <sneaky edit>

@stecks @aPaulTaylor @ColinTheMathmo @standupmaths and/or your remake of The Italian Job is running considerably under-budget

@C_J_Smith I haven't noticed a difference

@tombutton I have, like, a photographic memory for tweets. You probably saw this: twitter.com/GregSchwanbeck…

@robeastaway are you in the region for long?

@evelynjlamb nice meme

just wrote what looks like "otters can use my work". I think I meant "others can use my work", but might see a new research opportunity

@samholloway if he had an opinion, surely he would have coded it into the system wolframalpha.com/input/?i=recom…

@JPalmerLFC @qikipedia it's the only such pair of primes in the first 50,000. Just a coincidence though.

@samholloway weirdly, it doesn't know how to answer the obvious follow-up: wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+…

Just got a lovely note from @lyd_w through work's internal mail. Feel I should reply by carrier pigeon

@My_Metro @DavidJSharples @tmalbrghtn that's the same answer you just gave, but somehow even more vague

@Nat_Numeracy @DrEugeniaCheng that formula is nonsense

@Andrew_Taylor --no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-limit

Finally complete! RT @aperiodical: Apiological: mathematical speculations about bees (Part 3: Travelling Salesman) aperiodical.com/?p=7750

This is the smallest banana I've ever seen!

I live with that hand, so it's less surprising RT @cnrlwlss: @christianp Smallest banana, or biggest hand?

Ladies and gentlemen, @outofthenorm2 HAS FINISHED HIS BEES POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Over two years in the making, all three parts are now online.

I work a 4-day week, for medical reasons. I took a 20% pay cut, of course. But I reckon I'm as productive as anyone else working five days.

If only my output could be easily quantified.

The dog is more organised than I am. She puts herself to bed at bang on 9pm every night. How does she do it?

Time to play England's favourite game: where is the sun?

@LargeCardinal @icecolbeveridge etymonline says meaning "third part of X" from 14th C., but no reference

@LargeCardinal @icecolbeveridge (etymonline.com/index.php?allo…)

The sun came out for a tiny moment! Clouded over again by the time I'd put a pinhole in a thing though. Boo

I've watched SEVERAL videos of frozen pea factories on YouTube and I still don't know how they get them out of the pods.

This Pathé film has a lovely jazz soundtrack though youtu.be/BL_xPZzSd8Q

I don't think Mr. Pea Sheller is the answer youtube.com/watch?v=Pk9arl…

This chap is also proud of his homemade pea sheller. youtube.com/watch?v=6bTRO6… In other news, American peas look weird. Are they really beans?

@evelynjlamb Mr. Pea Sheller is the answer to a different question

@evelynjlamb we call big ones 'garden peas' and small ones 'petits pois'

@evelynjlamb I think so? Don't make me do more googling, Helen's already had enough pea factoids for one morning

In conclusion, peas is a land of contrasts. Thank you.

Little leftover scone poo, I love you! #tinyfoodinCPsmassivehands

@FryRsquared @robeastaway or @drvinceknight ?

@lyd_w I was just there!

Today's google doodle is celebrating Emmy Noether's 133rd birthday! google.com/doodles/emmy-n…

@wacnt 7: barium hafnium krypton oxygen silver ununquadium lawrencium

Oh, there's a third issue of the recreational maths magazine. If only they published in a sensible format rmm.ludus-opuscula.org/Home

@aperfect @Cennydd mathjax! mathjax.org
Or the heavy load might scare you, in which case try KaTeX khan.github.io/KaTeX/

@JanvierUK does this do anything for you? reddit.com/r/animalslooki…

@evelynjlamb don't jump on @outofthenorm2's turf: aperiodical.com/?s=apiological

@evelynjlamb @outofthenorm2 if only he'd waited a little bit longer before publishing!

@tim_hunt @wacnt jings! In that case: lawrencium oxygen zinc krypton rutherfordium silver molybdenum

Newcastle @MathsJam is tonight! 7pm at the Charles Grey pub. I've been rubbish at sending out reminders. Oh well!

@mathemaniac what's that from?

@mrscott_edwards @mathemaniac do you know what it's called?

@mrscott_edwards oh well! Thanks anyway

@stecks @standupmaths well, now I know how I'm ending my next proof by counterexample. #notallintegers

Oxford Journals websites are horrendous to use. Where is the archive? Where is the submit link? Open access terms? #aaaarggggg

Welp, Oxford Journals now thinks I'm Mrs. Perfect.
HIRE A WEB DESIGNER.

Oh wow, and it sends me my password in plain text every time I change my profile. Good job I made up a new one!

Londoner on the Metro complaining about the layout of the lines. "It's topologically equivalent to the circle line!", I'm desperate to say

Spent arguably too long solving the @chalkdustmag crossnumber. I am now the owner of a very big IPython notebook.

For how long has apple and blackcurrant squash contained plums? This new Robinson's tastes odd.

Questions I'm editing often use "males" and "females" as generic mutually exclusive groups. Can you suggest a drop-in replacement?

So far I have "marmite lovers" v "marmite haters" and "NUFC supporters" v "right-minded citizens"

@lyd_ncllt ooh, I like mods v rockers

Crikey O'Reilly, these stats questions are all so needlessly heternormative!

@owens_bill one question was about the average time spent on the phone, and I can't be bothered to rewrite all that!

@owens_bill I suppose I could go with nationalities or regions - northerners vs southerners, etc.

@icecolbeveridge they need to be a) people and b) realistic

It pains me to leave all these instances of `dx` and not change to `\; \mathrm{d}x`. Must be efficient! Must not get distracted by JUSTICE

Very good! "@ColinTheMathmo: @christianp jugglers and non-jugglers ??"

@robinhouston spitting/sobbing - crying so hard that the tears shoot across the room?

@ColinTheMathmo I don't know, but I once offended an estate agent by pointing out the many grammatical errors in the lease I was signing

@lyd_w I have yet to win my fiancé over to this line of thinking

@lyd_w um... fiancée

@lyd_w yes, like this

@lyd_w oh, it regularly reaches the top of the table

@poveryant yep, going to fix that now

@gingerbeardman superb!

@SeeNewcastleUK nice use of a filter to reduce the grimness

@katemath go with it: get a load of Phoenix Wright "OBJECTION!!!" stickers

@katemath (this US reference is lost on me)

@ColinTheMathmo @gingerbeardman just googled it for you: wkhtmltopdf.org

Current status: workbench

@futurebird you might like @peterrowlett's worksheet theme for @NclNumbas - e.g. numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/exam/764/sffs-…

This is such a cool tune youtube.com/watch?v=TZp_nG…

Life achievement: I'm an original source in a wikipedia article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathOverf…

Gathering data for my new app, which offers betting advice based on horses' star signs: Astrologee-gee.

@PerudoJedi I'd be surprised if there was a noticeable difference

It's 2015 and I can't open two Excel spreadsheets in separate windows

@yanoak yeah, worked that out. Needlessly obtuse though

A question occurred to me in Peckham this weekend: which is a better offer - "all items £1", or "many items 98p"?

@ajkiddle when I'm only buying a few things, I like to think of the mad project that would require all of them

@DanGMartin1 @MathsJam it's in big letters on the website: Tuesday 21st of April mathsjam.com

@robinhouston it makes your point even stronger.

Apparently at some point I bound the calculator button on my keyboard to "shut down".

@ajk_44 @stecks excitement is hyperexponential

@C_J_Smith @icecolbeveridge sounds like a cause for an aperiodical round-up post

Suppose you forget the first 294 decimal digits of pi. Don't worry! You can use the rest to get within 0.00033 of the true value!

@icecolbeveridge @CardColm I wonder how many times the title of "world's oldest person" has been transferred without the incumbent dying

@icecolbeveridge @CardColm I was thinking more along the lines of documentation coming to light that proves someone is older/younger

.@pkrautz is there a reason the MathJax on a yellow background here - mathoverflow.net/questions/2015… - looks less heavy than the maths on white?

@sxpmaths ooh, I'm writing a load of computer-based coding theory questions at the moment

Shopping for a new lunch bag. I wish they made a larger one of these! amazon.co.uk/Skip-Hop-Zoo-L…

I've found another silly π sequence: best approximations to π found by forgetting the first a(n) decimal digits of π oeis.org/A256516

@pkrautz do I mean green? The bit with the accepted answer

I think I discovered a new fact about the 1-counting sequence, A000120! I did some real maths! oeis.org/A000120

The dog has had a cool haircut and doesn't need our rules any more.

@ColinTheMathmo because Google broke everything trying to get people to use google+. The Gallery app should work without google+.

@ColinTheMathmo "gallery" is the original photo app. "photos" is the google+ one, that happens to also open local photos

@stecks @outofthenorm2 I've finished this month's puzzlebomb but I don't feel satisfied. Did I need 1a? It just came out as a side-effect

@JanvierUK wow, that's really really good!

@drvinceknight snap

Thought the chocolate in the cupboard was dark but it turns out to be milk. Who cares, I'm making ganache anyway.

@JanvierUK I just made this distinctly middling effort

@outofthenorm2 @stecks not sure. I think it unsettled me throughout the whole solution - I wanted to use it to check my other answers

@outofthenorm2 @stecks but, because of the nature of the clue, I couldn't

I had a horrible dream that I accidentally signed up for LinkedIn because of a bug in Windows 8. *shudder*

@gingerbeardman OK. I don't.

I love accidentally asking my computer for 5^8 complicated objects. It definitely doesn't crash it.

@Jisc your futurist doesn't know how to embed tweets?

Yet again, 2*2=2+2 leads to confusion

@ColinTheMathmo this one: 2

You know when you avoid a particular problem-solving method all day because it looks like an off-by-one error gold mine? That was me today.

Copious pages of incorrect alternate methods and about six hours of my life, all to avoid counting properly. Doesn't feel like time wasted.

@icecolbeveridge @ajk_44 that blew my mind in sixth form

@Sara_Tindall bravo!

@jjaron I suddenly feel a strong urge to insert a floppy disk in my PC and listen to it grind away

@jjaron I don't. It seems I have PC dysphoria.

@jjaron yisssss

LIES

Has anyone made an enigma machine out of a marble run yet?

@ReasJack @TimandraHarknes @DrLucyRogers ooh, there's something to spend the afternoon doing

Today is my wedding day (highly significant, p<0.0001)

@JanvierUK it is!

@JanvierUK someone from my primary school class got married on Easter Sunday

@icecolbeveridge adding a relation, one's complement, etc etc

Just tried to change my Twitter name to my new combo-breaker double-barrelled surname, but it is too long. Boo.

This wouldn't have been a problem if we'd gone with Lawfect or Person, like I wanted

@ColinTheMathmo @MrHonner @CmonMattTHINK this is why MathML has a load of invisible operators w3.org/TR/MathML3/cha…

@stecks /Sci-,{2,}/

@futurebird I'm trying to think of a game that *can't* be won with non-transitive dice. The usual games just *probably won't* be won

@robeastaway superb!

@robeastaway sometimes I feel a bit offended the maths questions are so easy and then I remember they're undergrad level

@AdamCreen @robeastaway there was one on hypotheses too

@KielderCatering will you be at any markets this weekend? Trying to put together ingredients for a birthday hamper

In Newzoids, why does the pope have an Italian accent?

I redid my homepage a while ago. It's very big. somethingorotherwhatever.com (like me)

@Bishnavitch you're losing your touch

@Kit_Yates_Maths @alexbellos @jamesgrime I prefer that one when it's wizards on a bus

@Kit_Yates_Maths @alexbellos @jamesgrime maybe I misremembered. Khovanova has a paper at arxiv.org/pdf/1210.5460.… but maybe there's another

@Kit_Yates_Maths @alexbellos @jamesgrime yeah. I'm sure I've seen one similar to yours before though. Wizards puzzles abound.

@solvemymaths I can do it without Pythagoras, but can I do it without fractions?

@ProfKinyon that could possibly describe gold OA, but not green or diamond

@ProfKinyon OK, yes.

@Kit_Yates_Maths @alexbellos @jamesgrime @aperiodical Tim Gowers has concocted a mad transfinite version plus.google.com/+TimothyGowers…

@WWMGT what does "geometrically similar" mean? Congruent to?

@solvemymaths oh, I got 96. I'll redo it.

@solvemymaths never mind, I got 96 square units, forgot the question asked for proportion shaded

@Kit_Yates_Maths I'm going to do a #thatlogicproblem round-up on the aperiodical, hopefully tonight. Can you send the PDF of your one?

@solvemymaths I'm happy I've found a nicer solution - before I added three triangles and a thin rectangle, now add two tris and sub one tri

@TimHarford that's a plot of a derivative - would it look less silly if you plotted the integral?

@ColinTheMathmo maybe take it out to the beach tomorrow, buy it an ice cream and tell it you love it

Searched for "deduction" on google images; found... just *so much* Sherlock slash

Following our nuptials, we now have 14 egg cups. Everyone round ours for eggs and soldiers tomorrow?

@CardColm I often use it to tell the tweeter I liked their tweet, if I don't want it on my timeline

@CardColm yep

@ColinTheMathmo you need a plan to get those things off that disk anyway, don't you? The disk will fail mechanically at some point

@ColinTheMathmo either run the HDMI cable through a capture box, or dd the disk fs and await clever sorts who can get the recordings out

I've rounded up some of the more mathematically interesting offshoots of the #thatlogicproblem hullabaloo twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

New phone. Search "android lock screen apps". Click on headline "N best lock screen apps" with smallest N. #listicles #content

@ColinTheMathmo selection bias: your selections are terrible

New sign on my office door!

@evelynjlamb I've eaten more than that before, with very few ill effects. You may need to scale for our relative weights though

It's Newcastle @MathsJam tomorrow! I'll be there, and so will some other maths bods. All welcome. Charles Grey pub, 7pm onwards.

I stand by it. Sick of pi. twitter.com/stecks/status/…

@HilariousCow @OneOneOneTwo3 is there any chance that app is in a state I could use it at MathsJam tomorrow? Otherwise I'll print cards

@HilariousCow android would be best, but can do windows

@HilariousCow (and if you're in London, you might want to go to the London meeting - you'll get plenty of feedback)

@HilariousCow player v player would be best. Don't go to too much trouble - I can play with cards!

Another integer sequence! I was amazed this one wasn't already in oeis.org/A257054

@jjsanderson @elinoroberts they've set the bar for "unusual" very low there

@sxpmaths that reads like a story from the 90s

@BBCTaster can I give your rating widget a rating?

@MrAllsopHistory @BootsUK @MissBsResources @Nat_Numeracy If you buy that with another product worth more than £8 it's still a good deal

Moodle is lovely, but every time I go into a new bit of it I lose hours trying to find adequate documentation. Currently: html_writer ‽

@tim_hunt does this thread still reflect the current state of affairs with html_writer? moodle.org/mod/forum/disc… Where should I look?

Come on Geordies, show some interest in uninhibited nerdery! twitter.com/FOTSN/status/5…

Attending a postgrad talk because it's about some interesting group theory. I don't recognise half the students. I am #old

Speaker has made the classic rookie mistake of making the talk accessible to non-specialists by omitting the content

.@Kit_Yates_Maths can it be over yet? I'm about to go to bed and all I can see is your face. Seriously!

@Kit_Yates_Maths THAT'S THE CREEPIEST TWEET I'VE EVER RECEIVED

Today: cleaning up my @moodledev SCORM changes and separating them out so they can hopefully go into the official source

@aperfect oh no! At least yours is indoors, isn't it?

I've just realised I can remap dark red in my console so my colourblind eyes can actually see it. Hooray!

@haggismaths have you seen plus.google.com/explore/whatso… ?

@mutedestro @komiga yes!

@katemath @divbyzero or: how rare it is for teaching maths to be worth your time when you can be a model

@divbyzero @katemath (lost track of the replies thread) - that blog could absolutely go in the @aperiodical. As infrequent as you like :)

@brittneybean so by implication the other parties have bigger black holes, or the IFS expects the government to change their spending plans?

@MouldS what does "opposite" mean, if the face is not a regular polygon?

@MouldS do you want a vertex to be on the normal out of (your choice of) centre of the face, or just inside the polygon when projected down?

@MouldS wasn't there a reason the trick for general polygons doesn't work on polyhedra? Otherwise, a method to make them is pretty obvious

@MouldS given an hour or so with a 3d modeller tomorrow I reckon I could have a go at one

2015's best video abstract? youtu.be/Mqd6W0TW9D0

"My dog's got no tail"
"How does he wag?"
"He doesn't feel like it"

Don't cut your dog's tail off, guys

@peterrowlett @aperiodical oh, it includes the old posts. Oops

@peterrowlett I reckon around 950 posts since we officially opened, which is ~5.9 per week. Surprising!

@C_J_Smith congratulations! Everyone's doing it, it seems!

aaarg I wrote out a list of the primes up to 100 and included the Grothendieck prime! I had to go to wikipedia before I found it

@theoremoftheday aka oeis.org/A038800, I see. Not sure if I like it.

@peterrowlett @C_J_Smith yeah yeah, you were married before it was cool, you relationship hipster

@theoremoftheday I've misunderstood. What are the 15 numbers?

@theoremoftheday the pic says "just remember 15 numbers" - does that mean 2357,1379,39,... ?

@brittneybean yes, with gifpop.io ?

Well, that's the first time I've got to a paywall and not even been able to read an abstract scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/j…

@robinhouston I think the problem is that it was being considered for listing.

@robinhouston there's an unreformed .gov.uk site explaining the rules for demolition - planningportal.gov.uk/permission/com… - you have to give notice

@helenarney is "a day in the life of a Klingon translator" one of the DVD extras? I'm enjoying imagining their face when the phone rang

Today's test user

@peterrowlett @mathhombre .. which is linked in the post. Just to check, John - are the links hard to distinguish visually from normal text?

@peterrowlett @mathhombre I'm massively colourblind, so it would be hypocritical to use a hard-to-see colour on my own site!

@mathhombre @peterrowlett oh good! Carry on as you were

The ironing pile was so big that garments at the bottom were turning into coal.

@ajkiddle yeah, I think that's the natural candidate for Most Unfortunate Word in Tech

After two days of leafletting, the dog has had enough of socialism and is joining the tories in the morning

@icecolbeveridge I'd be amazed if three quarters of people never had anything troubling them

After a friend squished an extremely big spider: is there a formula for the size of a spider's prey as a function of the spider's size?

I've been given a demo account on a Pearson product. This is what the link I was given shows. Find the sign-in link!

If you said "CP, there is no way to sign in from that page which is asking you to sign in", you win.

Nope, I've tried clicking everything. twitter.com/davidwees/stat…

OK, I've signed in. Now I'm bravely stepping into the 90s

@TynemthFoodFest are dogs welcome?

Sometimes I feel I'm not doing the best I could be, then I look at Pearson and remember they're taking fistfuls of cash for broken stuff

Guess where the "See what ..." button goes (never mind that the product names don't match)

If you guessed "a page for teachers listing white papers and research articles, you are a winner! And definitely not Mastering's webmaster!

@jgrahamc @Space_Station at least it's behind the mother of all air gaps?

Current status: deciding if research has been done on a topic by looking at the bibliography in @peterrowlett's thesis

@TynemthFoodFest I think your site's been hacked - there's a link to "hardcore xxx orn" at the top of the page

while idly looking at the Python grammar - docs.python.org/3/reference/gr… - I noticed `[expr for x in iter_1 for y in iter_2]` is valid. Hmm!

@ben_nuttall I'm sure I've read that before. Maybe it's just something that slips out of my head.

I got carried away fiddling with @Andrew_Taylor's majority coalition calculatron. christianp.github.io/majority/

@Andrew_Taylor why would I get rid of it? BTW, do you want a pull request?

something something bowling station something hit a strike for democracy

Inconceivable!

@jjsanderson that's my plan

This morning: booking in a hip replacement, keyhole heart surgery and some depression therapy while they're still free

After that, off to the pond to pick out the swans I'm going to buy on the cheap when they're privatised

Hard-working families can still look at my swans for free, or now they can join Swan Plus+ for a fee and feed them anything they like

I'd like to reiterate that should I win the swan franchise, I have no plans to sell them to a French butcher and replace them with mallards.

Yes I have advised the government that demand for swans is at a historic low so they should be priced accordingly, but there's no conflict

The part of my personality which independenty advises the government about swans and the part that wants to buy them are completely separate

still tweeting nonsense about swans to distract from the dystopia

The law to forbid geese and all waterfowl other than swans from using Britain's waterways will be a key plank of the government's programme

Obviously nobody will buy the swans if anyone can just look at a goose, which is basically a short fat swan, for free

In order to protect swan owners' investments, I have advised the government to allow them to impose a charge for looking at swans

Britain's benefits claimants are workshy scroungers. That's why they'll be required from June to show they've looked at 5 swans each week

Oh god, they're actually going to sell off the swans, aren't they? I don't think I can be hyperbolic enough today.

@sxpmaths @DrBennison I can! Numbas is at numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk, and the workshop info is at sigma-network.ac.uk/numbas-worksho…

@DrBennison @sxpmaths all runs in the browser. Can integrate with a VLE to track scores, but runs standalone fine. Or make printed sheets!

"Does Not Commute" is a fun game and an excellent pun play.google.com/store/apps/det…

@JSEllenberg it turns out democracy is incompatible with Britishness: we're more concerned about what people think than expressing ourselves

@TynemthFoodFest do you know your website is broken? I was trying to look up the programme for today

It's not going well.

In dog years, our puppy is now a teenager. I live in fear of stumbling across her tumblr.

@sxpmaths £299 to learn about free software?!

Newcastle @MathsJam is next Tuesday, 7pm in the Charles Grey. Puzzles and games in a pub, all welcome. @scienceatlife @NCLMathsStats

I'm nearly 30, and this is what I bring my lunch to work in. It's less disgusting when I have a sandwich

@divbyzero is this like the numbering of dihedral groups all over again?

After what feels like an age spent dealing with Life (not unenjoyably), I've put two posts in the @aperiodical news queue.

@icecolbeveridge did you ever do a blog post about fishy election graphs?

Homepages of the 4 open access e-assessment journals I found. They all look terrible. Get what you pay for, I suppose

@SITP_NCL Next Tuesday, MathsJam is a monthly meeting of maths enthusiasts in a pub. Might appeal to you! mathsjam.com

@campusnorthuk Next Tuesday, MathsJam is a monthly meeting of maths enthusiasts in a pub. Might appeal to you! mathsjam.com

@Andrew_Taylor I'm reminded of the episode where they say they only recorded one "meep" for road runner

@SITP_NCL yes, I certainly am!

@eAssess it could start by allowing access to articles without logging in

Current status: I got to 19 playing Twenty. THAT'S NOT TWENTY! twenty.frenchguys.net

@Andrew_Taylor feed it a book on markov chains

@samholloway "Christian is a little bit disappointed on the A1"

Difficulty level: autism

@komiga I'm saying maybe I'm particularly well adapted to this game

@komiga ?!

@komiga yep

Spot the difference. I see these every day on my way to work and it's been annoying me for weeks.

@eAssess just downloaded and installed the OJS software. It's these two checkboxes in the Journal Manager page

@eAssess I was looking around because I have a paper that would actually be a good fit for IJEA, but...

@eAssess ... I don't count "viewable after registering" as "published". Might as well put it on my own blog!

@ajkiddle #inadvertentpunlife

@aPaulTaylor that only works if you omit 'It's "tomorrow I'll learn".', but requires the reader to have come up with the same joke as you

@eAssess peer review is no good if they're the only people who see it! Thanks for looking into the login thing

@mscroggs @chalkdustmag attributions for the puzzles would be nice. For example, Tanya Khovanova came up with "where is the party?"

@chalkdustmag @mscroggs super!

This dude is loving his commute home! (don't worry, I'm in the passenger seat and we were stopped)

I got to 20x4 playing Twenty. Pretty good going! twenty.frenchguys.net

To explain a recent tweet: one theory about autism is we have weak central coherence en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_cent… which might make me better at 20

@jjaron welp, that was a fun adventure. Feel a bit queasy!

@jjaron what's worse is, as soon as I did it I realised I already knew what it did

@haggismaths One for "What's on my Blackboard" twitter.com/sam_james30/st…

"Moving to javascript made writing low-level code much easier." - 2015, ladies and gentlemen.

@GhostMutt incidentalcomplexity.com/2014/10/16/ret…, under "August"

Further adventures in high-quality journals

@ColinTheMathmo I have a hotel room metric: total distance furniture must be moved to get access to a socket

@JamesMoosh crikey!

@ibdknox @GhostMutt yep: previously, JavaScript was about as high-level as you could get

@sxpmaths does anyone not?!

Are there any Amsterdam @MathsJam-ers? I'll be in Amsterdam on the 23rd next month, which is MathsJam night

@DeDaanmans I'm actually travelling back from Zeist. My flight is 22.05 - if I can be at Schiphol by around 21.00, we could meet and do math

Here's a data mining challenge: find the flight that lands furthest in the past (if you don't know about timezones)

e.g., when I fly back from Amsterdam I land 15 minutes after I take off. If I was flying to London Southend, I'd land exactly as I took off

aha! AMS->Norwich arrives 10 minutes in the past flightexplorer.schiphol.nl/web/flight-exp…

WHY IS MICROSOFT WORD SO MASSIVELY RUBBISH

Time until LaTeX: 7 minutes

@alexbellos the equation after "we can tidy" has +11+10 instead of -11-10

Teacher friends, please settle an argument: what are your chances of getting a job in FE with a PGCE but no QTLS (or QTS)?

@CardColm I'd be amazed if Martin didn't know of him

@CNE98MFC what subject(s) were you teaching? Did the people with no qualifications have other experience?

@CNE98MFC OK thanks, I'll pass that on

@ColinTheMathmo @MathJax I was trying to reproduce this yesterday and only managed it on mobile. I can help debug in the future if you want

@ColinTheMathmo @MathJax yeah, no problem. I'm in bed currently.

Bank holiday snug

@DeDaanmans cool! Do you know anywhere good near a train station? I should leave Zeist around 16.30

Just discovered you can't name a folder 'aux' in Windows, because DOS: coderanch.com/t/131585/gc/Fo…

@gingerbeardman crikey, what level is that?

@gingerbeardman I got past 200 this morning and I'm beginning to lose enthusiasm. Does it have an end?

AAARGGG. Overwrote all the work I did last night because I forgot I didn't commit on the remote, and forced a checkout. Pooooo

@ColinTheMathmo what model phone are you using?

Today's fun fact: if an eejit web developer sets the height of a vimeo embed to 0, vimeo returns a 403 on the request for the video file

Is this so people can't embed hidden videos in their pages to bump the viewing numbers?

Terrible colours on this: they look the same to me. Since one's the reflection of the other, why even include two?

@ajkiddle next-level Columbus cubing: plus.google.com/+AndrewStacey/…

@jgrahamc lawks, that's dystopian!

@d_spiegel I suppose it puts it on iPlayer for another week?

"Fruit Ninja: Math Master" - am I curious enough to spend £4? play.google.com/store/apps/det…

The dog and my wife are having a collective wail about the patriarchy. There's nothing they can do about it though bwahahaha!

Very exciting! From magicwhiteboard.co.uk

If my wife wasn't massively allergic, I'd get the blackboard in a heartbeat

@FOTSN @standupmaths @stecks @ColinTheMathmo Penrobe?

@FOTSN @standupmaths @stecks @ColinTheMathmo #tenuousfrenchpuns

I'm in Amsterdam! Not for long though: soon, I'll be in Bergen!

Norway! Yes, I'd give those fjords a prize

I'm a bad dogfather: it's the dog's 1st birthday and I'm away. She looks like she's handling it stoically anyway

Britain! And it's summer! You can shove your fjords, I want the sun

@Andrew_Taylor I don't get the capital Y - twitter usernames aren't case-sensitive, and it makes it look even more spammy

@robeastaway @curious_nick "real world maths"

After too long playing the others, I've made my own numbers-in-a-grid game. It's about sequences christianp.github.io/sequences/

@theoremoftheday any arithmetic sequence will do. Doesn't matter where the numbers are in the grid

@theoremoftheday yeah, I can't think how to word it without using mathmo terms

@mutedestro Use the number which is your current level (ie to move to level , use a 5)

@noneatnamesleft yes :)

@noneatnamesleft or if you get 1..n and n is your current level, it's n^3. Might get rid of that - it was better in an old version

@noneatnamesleft indeed. I was surprised how little tuning it took once I noticed that was a good tension

@noneatnamesleft no, it doesn't. Interesting question if it's possible to have no legal moves - difference of 0 is allowed

@noneatnamesleft something something Tao-Green theorem? I know @TweetsofCushing spent a long time thinking about progression-avoiding sets

@ronalddotgl @noneatnamesleft you could if those were all on the board

OK, it looks like the game is playable to non-me humans. Here's a target.

@jiyameng 24 (if you reload the page, I've just added the level to the game over screen)

@jiyameng use your current level number in a sequence

@noneatnamesleft sadly, no

Oh my twitter.com/jiyameng/statu…

@ronalddotgl well done :)

@aPaulTaylor you can use lots of the same number

Today's test user

@icecolbeveridge have I done Testeranza Spalding yet? That's a good one

Good grief! twitter.com/thomas_bland/s…

Jiminy willikers! twitter.com/jiyameng/statu…

@noneatnamesleft aha. I considered trailing back through thousands of tweets, but...

@jiyameng @thomas_bland how are you two doing this? I haven't got much further than 2 million yet

@jiyameng @thomas_bland how many games are you playing? That's astronomically unlikely!

@Rokker816 christianp.github.io/sequences/

@Rokker816 uniformly random from the range 1..level

@thomas_bland @jiyameng hm. I'm still missing a key ingredient

Nearly! @thomas_bland @jiyameng

@jiyameng @thomas_bland I tried, but didn't have enough moves left. This was my last move

I've added (local) high scores to #sequencesgame christianp.github.io/sequences

@jiyameng no, I'll add one

Wahey! I'm feeling good about this one @jiyameng @thomas_bland

@noneatnamesleft @jiyameng @thomas_bland my kingdom for a 1!

@noneatnamesleft @jiyameng @thomas_bland ok, I think that'll do

I'm trying and failing to turn my simple HTML+JS game into an android app. Phonegap seems to do animations really slowly. What should I use?

Game Closure is a mess of nonsense that I can't get to work. Boohoo.

@jiyameng @thomas_bland OK, first one to a billion gets an ice cream

@pkrautz requires OSX, and only seems to build iOS apps at the moment

One of these mallards is parked incorrectly

A teeny tiny integer sequence review is happening with @TweetsofCushing

@stecks small in the time dimension?

de Bruijn sequences used to crack codes again, but this time remote garage door locks! it.slashdot.org/story/15/06/05… @jamesgrime

Previously in de Bruijn sequence lock cracking news: youtube.com/watch?v=85-PsY…

@standupmaths markers inexplicably not clickable. Also, it doesn't show a Voronoi diagram of nearest gig, like the closest MathsJam map

@standupmaths oh, now they're clickable. Ooerr.

Today, I found some old code that I wrote before I'd realised this was a fact: stackoverflow.com/questions/7000…

@FOTSN I demand a poster teaching the three Ms: maths, music and metalwork!

@kirel there are reasons you might want it to work the way it does - for example, if sorting/grouping by more than one key

@icecolbeveridge that's ridiculous.

@OddballDave haha, that looks ace!

Happy birthday choo choo! twitter.com/StephensonRail…

Little question: how many decimal places of precision am I giving this number to: 1.23E-5

I'm pretty happy it's three significant figures. Do decimal places have any meaning in scientific notation?

@icecolbeveridge ta

Can any wolfram alpha wizards work out why this is getting me a 2d plot instead of a surface? wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+…

💩@FryRsquared @theoremoftheday @helenjbradley or you can use a pile of poo. The opportunities are endless!

@christianp because it doesn't depend on n, doiiiiii

The OEIS has no sequences marked both "easy" and "hard". oeis.org/search?q=keywo… This should be like clopen.

@j_lanier @MathPaper on first glance, I'm inclined not to believe it

aaahhhh, building android apps is too hard. Even the phonegap hello world example doesn't work. The docs are terrible. I give up.

@helenarney I got a Shark one a while ago, and it's really good. Very well designed. Think it's this one currys.co.uk/gbuk/home-appl…

Making a publications page for the @NclNumbas website. Getting it to parse bibtex data would be overkill, wouldn't it?

So many questions! twitter.com/AVBorovik/stat…

Falling down the rabbit hole of internet left-hander activism indiana.edu/~primate/lspea…

Uffie's album is a good choice for today

@ColinTheMathmo yep!

@Raspberry_Pi
"My Raspberry Pi's got no nose!"
"How does it smell?"
"In a limited fashion."

I have a vague memory of someone, a few years ago, applying the zip algorithm to songs. Was it @jgrahamc?

Good: getting asked for ID when buying alcohol. Bad: the lady apologising when she sees how old you really are

Put your problems in perspective with this tiny teeny Rubik's cube: shapeways.com/product/MXFQHL…

I'm going to America in August. It's all sorted, but I'm terrified I'll spend two days in New York and be too witless to find good food

An Enigma machine wrist watch!!!!! asciimation.co.nz/bb/2015/03/24/…

@peterrowlett @stecks isn't it obvious?

@stecks @peterrowlett yeah, he's a starting pitcher for the Orioles

I have extreme protanomaly, so @TweetsofCushing challenged me to do that colour vision test. #smashedit

Yep twitter.com/a_cruickshank/…

@ruimvieira ooh, is it out? Lovely!

This contains several very good points about why blackboards are better than whiteboards twitter.com/robinhouston/s…

@peterrowlett @NclNumbas yep, no problem. It began life as an internal report

@peterrowlett oh god, it's using Open Journal Systems. Lord save us from this terrible software

@DeDaanmans are you still up for doing some maths next tuesday?

@DeDaanmans super. At Cafe Maria?

@DeDaanmans :)

No Newcastle @MathsJam next week, because I'll be in Holland. But that means...

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY, there will be a Utrecht, NL @MathsJam. Tuesday the 23rd, Grand Cafe Maria. mariautrecht.nl

@DeDaanmans looks like I'll have to leave at 20:00 at the absolute latest. Can be at Utrecht station (or the cafe) around 17:00

If an expression simplifier rewrote `x-0` to `x+0`, would you be angry with it? Is it ever worth rewriting `-0` to `0`?

@RobertTalbert what kind of exercises do you have in mind?

@peterrowlett the user interface is very hard to learn

I'm immensely proud of this: #cherylssweets twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

@peterrowlett is somebody going to work on the CSS for the journal site? The text is so teeny tiny!

@ThomasEWoolley yes, that's good, and there's also this vimeo.com/70589461 (which I included in aperiodical.com/2013/08/aperio…)

Whose idea was it to put a full copy of MathJax in my dropbox? It's taking so long to sync...

@JanvierUK tell someone else your fears. If they say you're paranoid, you're paranoid.

The new Hiatus Kaiyote album is really really good

Reasons matplotlib uses inches instead of centimetres for measurements:

Tweetdeck is determined not to show me any tweets older than 3 hours. At some point everything just gets folded into "more tweets"

@TauntonMathsJam @MathsJam I haven't been able to edit the map for a while. Should be able to do it soon.

@ColorDeck you can?! How?

The number of carries required when working out n^2 by long multiplication

@BenTormey I'ma let you finish, but the omelette I made on Tuesday was the best meal of all time. OF ALL TIME.

4D 79 20 40 46 4F 54 53 4E 20 73 7F 7E 66 66 20 61 72 72 69 76 65 64 21 21 21 03

@Derektionary yeah, but I've got two drafts that the editors seem to have forgotten about, so I didn't feel like submitting it

@Derektionary yeah, I think I put a link in the entry.

This book by the cartoonist Baudoin and Cedric Villani looks lovely vanityfair.fr/culture/livre/…

I need to set up a @wacnt but for terrible integer sequences. Here's one: n divides the nth prime

@Andrew_Taylor "it's just, not cricket"?

I'm sitting upstairs! On a train! In Holland!

Two new integer sequences: oeis.org/A258757 is about palindromic powers, and oeis.org/A258756 is about my sequences game

Really annoying: no electric sockets in the rooms at this conference, so my phone will be dead when I leave

@samholloway @aperiodical @MathsJam yeah, we couldn't find a picture of the Stone room. Probably because it's so unattractive

@dmh10 can we use that picture in our post?

@elinoroberts for some reason I read that as "aurochs watch". Not sure why. Very different.

The Dutch are lovely but when they talk it's like this youtu.be/FcUi6UEQh00

@robeastaway to some more decimal places, the rate required to lose 50% is 2.734% per year, so it's not so bad to round down.

@robeastaway and 2.34 leaves <55%, which you couldn't be blamed for rounding off to nearest 10%. So double rounding error is to blame

@robeastaway well yes, I did think of that but hesitated to say

@DrCaroSummers you've found a bit of Derby without hills?!

@standupmaths @MathsJam not on the website, but I'm in the Cafe Maria in Utrecht tonight with some maths people

@lismati @standupmaths @MathsJam Start one!

@DeDaanmans? What time can I meet you? I'm going to spend the afternoon being a tourist in Utrecht; where should we meet?

@DeDaanmans yes, the station is a good place!

@DeDaanmans maybe 5 o'clock?

Relative floor numbers! What an innovation!

@DeDaanmans I'm walking up from the Centraal museum and just round the corner from the Cafe, so can we meet outside there?

@FOTSN am I the 1st to present at an academic conference in a nerd t-shirt? No photos but it was in Holland so there's probs an oil painting

@FOTSN the audience appeared unmoved

@FOTSN but a little bit smaller at the end? Maybe they were an eigenvector.

@FOTSN a couple of people said they liked it. There weren't many mathematicians there

@FOTSN I mean, I was hoping someone would call it degenerate, but that would only be true if NERD=0

Ooh, that's pleasing.

Decided to try out being more pessimistic, by believing this sequence is finite for a day: oeis.org/A255190

Idea: mix Cheryl's birthday and battleships, with automatic commentary generated from valid inferences based on players' moves.

@peterrowlett @stecks @aperiodical like a triangle, we have multiple equally justifiable centres

@aperfect lovely day for it! It's miserable up here

@nclroblib @NCLMathsStats here, have this:
⌈ 0 -1 ⌉
⌊ 1 0 ⌋

@lyd_w but I am in Edinburgh! O, what terrible fate!

@evelynjlamb I approve this message

Actually, 'banana' is the plural. Just one of them is called a bananum.

Boo! Down with infinite spaces! On this I am UNMOVING. twitter.com/MathCounterexa…

@drvinceknight on a Sunday?

Today: looking up artists whose debut albums I own, to see if they've made more. Carla Morrison and Sarah Jarosz: yes!

@MrsWilliamsBP email Katie at manchester@mathsjam.com

@drvinceknight oh dear. Sensible working hours are important

I speak accidental truth! twitter.com/nillie_kj/stat…

@GreyAlien I went there a couple of years ago. Loved it! I must go back soon

@jjaron IS MARS FLOODING?

What a sad bananum.

@MB_Whitworth I used to watch the repeats of that in the morning before school!

We must raise school standards so we never again get such a fantastically statistically illiterate education secretary

@ajkiddle ah yes! I visited that a few years ago to settle a bet about the original colour of carrots

@ajkiddle I knew about it before I knew about you! To tell you all of those things would take a long time

@standupmaths @numberphile of course, I immediately tried to sloanewhack the associated sequence. It's already in: oeis.org/A057896

@standupmaths STOP PRESS: people born in 30 BC would be 3 in 3^3 BC, 5 in 5^2 BC, and 15 in 15 BC!

!!! twitter.com/alexallmont/st…

Thought I was going mad for a moment, but I made the canonical error: cos(32 radians) is very close to cos(32 degrees).

More momentary madness: given 51° and 39°, wondered why sin and cos were the same but swapped, then did some thinking

Something odd is happening today: internet radio stream broke exactly when I muted my speakers.

I am king of coincidences. Koingcidences.

@ruimvieira I think you just start receiving mail addressed to the King of Coincidences

@JamesMoosh there isn't one. For any e, you can find an n with difference less than e. I've found record-setters: oeis.org/draft/A259621

@pkra how meta: the big image on the mathjax frontpage contains a computer screen showing the old mathjax frontpage.

Welp, the thunder has arrived so I'm heading home before @My_Metro breaks

Ladies and gents, I failed: the metro has stopped because of a lightning strike

@FryRsquared work your way through Dundes et al, "Foolproof: a sampling of mathematical folk humor" ams.org/notices/200501…

@jamesgrime Julia Turing has written some comments on your imitation game FAQ aperiodical.com/2014/11/an-ala…

@jamesgrime yeah, but she's got previous in agitating about him

@jamesgrime I have a feeling you wrote about that in one of your other posts. Did you?

@DrBennison here: sigma-network.ac.uk/numbas-worksho… it's on Monday and Tuesday though

An oral history of computing, as told by people attempting to override scrollbars.

My dog is not mad: while this Englishman has been outside reading, she's been keeping cool here

@christianp just looked at that photo again and I'm beginning to wonder: has my dog been using my laptop?

@peterrowlett I think, given that she was strongly encouraged to go outside, the preponderance of the evidence points to her not being mad

This is fascinating but I can't muster the energy to write at length about it bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/…

In my opinion, the judge has got it exactly right, and hasn't redefined what 1 means, as claimed by the Indy independent.co.uk/news/science/w…

@ThomasEWoolley I'm on the same train as you! How far are you going?

Ooh, I've just worked out what my big @MathsJam talk this year is going to be.

Ah, Sheffield station burger king. I only find myself in you when my day has gone horribly wrong

@matheknitician does it - dare I ask - involve fabric?

@ColinTheMathmo what's the process for adding a person to share a room? Update my details and send you the difference in cost?

Challenge: label train carriages so that it is easy from any position to work out which way your carriage is, relative to the nearest

A, B, C, D,... is no good because is A at the front or back? And where's the front?

Maybe segments of a wedge - thick end at one end of the train, thin at the other, so one carriage's symbol points to the thin end

How do you refer to that though? Maybe do the same in letters: carriages labelled AB, BC, CD,... except the other side goes DC, CB, BA...

@icecolbeveridge yeah, that would also work. But I'd like what's on the ticket to match what's on the carriage

@icecolbeveridge so can we think of an ordering in space that doesn't bring to mind direction of movement?

@icecolbeveridge yeah, well, if you're adding embellishments, you can just draw little arrows labelled with the other carriage letters

@icecolbeveridge oooooh, VERY nice!

@icecolbeveridge yes, the ordering needs to be independent of the direction of travel of the train. That's the whole problem!

Unexpectedly at East Midlands Parkway. They've erected a hyperboloid in my honour. Good work!

@icecolbeveridge so maybe my wedges were a good idea after all!

@peterrowlett yeah, so close but so far! I remember you saying it was your nearest

@ThomasEWoolley you looked like you might be a bit done with the day. Never mind!

A worrying phrase from today's spam comments: "puppy drum fishing"

@DrCaroSummers what is the German word that makes men uncomfortable?

@DrCaroSummers maybe both?

@evelynjlamb we just queued when we got there. Maybe they've changed the system

@evelynjlamb @katemath (if it helps, we don't have either of those labels in the UK)

@evelynjlamb @katemath if anything, we're divided into "got mine" (grew up pre 80s) and "ruined by Thatcher" (afterwards)

@evelynjlamb @katemath but no, we don't have generational labels.

Not many people know that when it's on land it's actually called a Flag Russell

I've done so many things today and IT'S ONLY 8:52AM!! Boohoo!

@HilariousCow aka the human condition?

@futurebird bravo! That is a solid pun

@MrHonner also implemented by Simon Tatham and available in the many mobile ports chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzz…

@badmachinery I also liked it! The last panel is a killer.

At work we've rewritten our curriculum from scratch. That means I have to sort through and tag 1000 @NclNumbas questions by hand...

Who can beat the 1st clerihew?

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium twitter.com/FOTSN/status/6…

John Horton Conway's
Achievements go a long ways
But all he gets is strife
For that damned game of life

@CardColm oh no! I'd better finish it and write my review then

@CardColm (I would've caught "niche is the esoteric world"... no subeditors at huffpo?)

@adelebeeken @peterrowlett I've been using mendeley for years, as you probably know. There's also zotero, which is ethically better

@Tomboktu @aperiodical @stecks haha, that's nice.

@icecolbeveridge @aPaulTaylor if I'd bothered to write my post about that high court rounding case, I would've included banker's rounding

This author has written "auxillary" so many times I've started to doubt myself

About halfway through question-relabel-a-thon 2015: we've got loads of stuff we haven't been using!

This is a fantastic title for a book: "Let's Be Less Stupid" by Patricia Marx amazon.co.uk/Lets-Be-Less-S…

Does anyone else think this is weird notation for a double integral?

Conclusion: physicists do bad things to notation

I wanted "dy dx" on the end! twitter.com/C_J_Smith/stat…

@C_J_Smith that does appeal, yes..

@C_J_Smith this is from a Numbas test. I don't dirty my hands with integrals in real life

@Samuel_Hansen happy birthday!

I feel ya, sleepy wardrobe

Listening to Aim, getting nostalgic about working on a rubbish game with @aperfect for my summer work experience

Yes, yes, I know exactly what you mean!

Just learnt a new maths word: a katadrome is a number whose hexadecimal digits are strictly decreasing oeis.org/A023797