Tweets from 2017

Some fascinating fluid dynamics on the beach this morning, like a level from tomb raider

Oh no no no. There are too many squares! twitter.com/LinaresFreire/…

Today's confusion: the sofa shop's website doesn't list all the sofas they sell, but does list some colours they don't sell any more 😕

This is very relevant to my interests! twitter.com/Parcly_Taxel/s…

Idea: a course in Algebra, in puns. From "why is 6 afraid of 7" to "why can't you grow wheat in ℤ₆"

@Andrew_Taylor I think I can remember seeing this a while ago. First link on google is arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/… from October

Thanks to @mathematish for spotting a tiny but important transposition typo in the explanation page for three.onefouronefivenine.com

Registering with a new GP, some inadvertent information about the frequencies of different first letters in surnames

@christianp later on the same form: I have several marvellous disabilities, but this line is too small to describe them

A step from an automatic tutoring system which will remain nameless. This isn't OK, is it? Even if you don't have much space to explain

Because I haven't looked at it in depth yet, and because I make some software in the same arena, so I know how hard it is twitter.com/odtorium/statu…

@odtorium I mean, yes, but if I'm going to complain about it I'd like to do it somewhere with more room than twitter

@christianp WHOAH WHOAH whoah - this is even less OK!

@RobJLow yes: a-level is when kids should start asking all sorts of hard questions about what numbers are and treating ∞ as one doesn't help

@DavidB52s built-in. In fact, it's the demo question on their front page. It's a series of steps, with multiple choice responses

@RobJLow STEP

Gladly! twitter.com/ajk_44/status/…

@ajk_44 could you dm me more info?

@JanvierUK happy birthday!

Pierre Py seems to have invented the word 'cubulable', which sounds like an underwater fart. via @NewtonInstitute newton.ac.uk/seminar/201701…

@Gelada is the glass an aperiodic tiling with two shapes?

@riversjumping @csgillespie a typo on the front page, under Jamie's pic: "He has ran"

Is there a word for the reciprocal of a lakh? I want a prefix in between milli- and micro-

Well done, IE, that's exactly what I was trying to do

Just spotted @NclNumbas was mentioned in TUGboat: researchgate.net/profile/Sabri_…. Nice!

@icecolbeveridge 10 minutes in the sin-bin, Beveridge.

@icecolbeveridge the only Scottish maths/football pun I will accept is "East Fife 4, Forfar 5"

Maths teachers! Do you put homework online? Do you have an online learning environment? Commercial product like mymaths? @mathsjem

@Whiteman_Maths what's your VLE?

@jjaron but some systems are objectively worse than others, so progress can be made

@mathsjem do you know who makes the portal?

My secondary school online homework findings: overwhelmingly commercial prods, very self-contained. No evidence of open source alternative

Schools don't have resources to set things up themselves, so buy in, & one big contract is easier than getting several to work together

So: is it a fool's errand for us to offer something based on Numbas as a free/cheap tool? Would it be unusable for institutional reasons?

@icecolbeveridge thanks! I suppose something for tutors to use would be good - I've wanted Numbas while helping friends' kids in the past

@singinghedgehog yes, that's my fear

Supplementary question: what format would a tool need to output marks to go into your other systems? Is entering marks by hand a big deal?

@icecolbeveridge @WrongButUseful it's my (probably last) Mersenne prime-th birthday on Saturday

@jamestanton nice one: I started up python notebook, and while it was getting ready I worked out the answer on paper

it's far too easy to fill a jupyter notebook with a billion lines of output, crashing your browser

Has anyone else had the idea of importing sugar from Denmark, calling it 'shygge', and cashing in big time on that inane trend?

@jam3s_hollow I'm not a natural pessimist, but I don't think I'll reach that

@icecolbeveridge the torygraph puts out these kind of nonsense items fairly regularly

NO WAY! They've got blackboard fever! And the only cure is... CHALK twitter.com/BrunoDuchesne/…

@discoverymaths @peterrowlett

@icecolbeveridge @asda a sieve you can write with? I'll take 5!

@itabn_andrew I get an error on this page: isthatabignumber.com/fact/populatio…
(turn off debug!)

@stecks a pencil. It only works if it's a pencil.

What is this future? I feel queasy. twitter.com/samholloway/st…

@Mathematical_A 18% of what? Total adverts?

♫ I'm dreaming of a white Christiansmas ♫

@FryRsquared congratulations!

Happy Christiansmas! My wife gave me these v. genteel bowls 👌

I didn't quite make it out! twitter.com/FactsOfMath/st…

@CarshaltonHigh unless I'm missing something, I can do it with just 1

@peterrowlett @DavidKButlerUoA @cass_lowry I've been trying to make mathmo more widespread. Meaning can evolve!

@CarshaltonHigh on refelection, it's harder to do it by removing 3, so that's the puzzle, isn't it?

@peterrowlett err... unicode decoding error, Peter?

@icecolbeveridge @peterrowlett I thought Peter was the Alfred to little Ben's Batman

@timstirrup there's a column for the sum of the digits in the product! Can't imagine what trick they'd be taught using that

@timstirrup oh no, I've looked more closely and it's the value mod 9. Now I get it

@monsoon0 oof, that's far too hot! You're in the right place

The water bottle I've just ordered from Amazon is labelled "unisex". Struggling to imagine a water bottle that isn't that.

@CounterOfSheep new business idea: fluids for the genderfluid

Eduroam at ICMS is surprisingly slow. The dozens of other people on laptops in this lecture theatre might have something to do with that.

whoah, passive-aggressively tweeting about it made it 10 times faster!

@monsoon0 not at ICMS, but I'm in Edinburgh next Thursday, and again some undecided day in the next fortnight

@walkingrandomly I'm back to work now, but hope to do an hour or two on the interactions site, especially merging @rgaiacs's PR, today

@standupmaths you want the moon (correctly aligned with respect to) a stick, you do

Just discovered that the a11y project has a very good and easy to understand accessibility checklist for web pages: a11yproject.com/checklist.html

@evelynjlamb did this site steal your post? studyscorecalc.com/2015/09/07/the…

please stay that way please stay that way please

Oh, I forgot to tweet this in the morning: happy first ISO-prime day of 2017! isthisprime.com/20170121

I've never liked Fermi questions, but this might get me hooked: fermiquestions.com/play

... having tried a few questions: nope, still don't like Fermi quesions

The amazon frontpage tells me I've been a member for more than half my life. This still feels like the future though

@HilariousCow one of the big realisations of my life was that there's a state of mind where your brain insists it wants to work, but can't

Turns out a large part of maintaining an open source project is helping people learn git. Happy to do it! github.com/numbas/Numbas/…

@HilariousCow I was in that state of mind yesterday. I played some mindless games while listening to podcasts, then did some house work

@icecolbeveridge I like this trick. It needs a name. I did something similar with counting negative objects in a room recently

@icecolbeveridge #unnecessaryperthburn

It's 10:30am and I want food. I've been at work for three hours, so I'm in the same relative state as a 9-5er who eats at midday, right?

Kudos to Cadbury for using a more seasonal symmetry group on their winter edition chocolate

on reflection (ha!), it's less seasonal than I thought: it's just the frieze pattern pm en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper…

@icecolbeveridge minusaur

/^_^/ is both a jolly face and a regex that matches nothing. I propose it as the official smiley of nonconformists everywhere

@icecolbeveridge I almost said "it's the piano keyboard tie of regular expressions"

Just plucked a hair out of my nose that must have been directly connected to the middle of my spinal cord. 😭

How come issue numbers in the titles of GitHub pull requests don't get linkified?

My teacher wife has to do observations on an iPad, but can't get wifi at forest school, ~20m from classroom. Is there an easy wifi extender?

Difficulty: it's a PFI school, so who knows what the rules are about plugging things in

@chris_a_wagner go back

@pkrautz could just be on PR pages. They already do it elsewhere, e.g. usernames are linked inside commit messages github.com/numbas/Numbas/…

We're always told scare stories about people moving the decimal place in dosage calculations. This happened a bit too close to home! twitter.com/michaeljgrove/…

Eee! Lovely birthday bowls from @aperfect!

Can I stretch Christiansmas out to a full month this year? It began on the 7th twitter.com/stecks/status/…

I'm not in Newcastle any more: this audience in Edinburgh has asked for the heating to be turned up. (Not my fault: I'm not talking yet!)

@MouldS easily solved: set up some rails traversing the room around hip height, and suspend the radiator from them, Nemesis-style

As my phone's battery sputters its last once more, I'm more confident than ever that m-tickets are a terrible idea.

Yet again, I've trashed my PC by picking a foolishly large upper bound for a range in a jupyter notebook.

@CardColm I discovered that book by walking past Zamyatin's blue plaque in Newcastle. Apparently he lived there for a while!

Two questions:
1) what's a salad sandwich
2) have you ever eaten one

Rewriting War and Peace as a kids' picture book.
"Is there meaning here, in the army?" Pierre asked.
"No, this army is meaningless too."

"Is there meaning *here*, in the Freemasons?" Pierre asked.
"No, fraternal society is meaningless too."

Is there a single verb for the act of blowing your nose? Like, 'exsnotulation'? @HaggardHawks, do you know one?

Explaining to the dog the concept of going to the beach without a ball and just for a walk

I've just joined mastodon.social, because maybe it'll end up better than twitter: mastodon.social/users/christia…

Yes, that does work! twitter.com/HaggardHawks/s…

#thatsthepoint twitter.com/BBCBreaking/st…

PyLint really doesn't like my code!

PyLint and I are friends again

@icecolbeveridge some warnings I disagree with but don't want to disable, in case they pop up elsewhere

@icecolbeveridge huh?

Today I am using R. It is mental. It's like someone took "PHP is a fractal of bad design" as an art prompt

yes, I'm not used to its way of thinking and yes, you're very productive with it, but please don't defend `regmatches`

This is causing #figgorative #explosions in my mind twitter.com/USGSVolcanoes/…

@MEIMaths what on earth did you use to make that image? And how come you don't use @MathJax? Here's a nicer version: checkmyworking.com/misc/makebigma…

I make no bones about the fact that `touch poo` is a fantastic thing to type into a terminal. Just tremendous. But what about `cat poo`?

@evelynjlamb @elcaborotativo I planned on taking a photo of that when I was there last summer, but we took the dog to phoenix park instead

@haggismaths 😨

oh goddddddd

@walkingrandomly sadly, there seem to be quite a few of his followers there

Today: looking for just the right monad

@NewtonInstitute that sculpture's lovely, but what's it got to do with Fibonacci?

@peterrowlett I have an "organise EAMS 2018" item on my to-do list. Yuck.

@panlepan have a look for William Dampier: scientist, and pirate!

The clothes caterpeuler diagram has had a significant upgrade, thanks to my unendingly patient wife, whom I don't deserve

Tried to tell my wife a bedtime story, but it was too intellectually stimulating. We abandoned after 2 minutes and the 3rd science question

@robinhouston yes, through this library github.com/cosmologicon/U…

Finding lots of goodies on arxivist.com - like last.fm for the arXiv!

@jamestanton that's midnight here. Why is the recording only for people who join the livestream?

Am I missing something, or does this middle school maths question ask for some quite sophisticated insight into semantics?

@davidwees I'm not sure it's even correct pedantry: the second option is true, it just doesn't say anything about how they chose

OK, consensus is the question is wrong. Carry on about your business. twitter.com/christianp/sta…

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! twitter.com/BrendanArmagh/…

We have a winner! Turns out the numbers are randomised. A second run has "2 students chose the 1", catching exactly this error twitter.com/aPaulTaylor/st…

@shahlock do you want "the Xs represent ..." prepended to each option?

#examtechnique twitter.com/efrataitel/sta…

@RobJLow @BrendanArmagh fortunately for all of us, inability to understand Cantor's diagonalisation is not hereditary

Pick 1000 integers. Integer n is picked uniformly from the range (0,n). What's the mode? Mean? Can you describe the whole distribution?

@RobJLow oh, yes! Just thought about it a bit more.

@RobJLow yes, I don't mean diagonalisation. I mean the classic bijection

@p3d40 you pick

@icecolbeveridge no, nth integer is picked from (0,n)

@aPaulTaylor MLEs for both

@jgrahamc done and done etsy.com/listing/213778…

@jgrahamc or this rather fetching set sueper-store.de/product/planet…

if you're a terrible person, it's easy to accidentally make the same point as the actual nazis twitter.com/krautreporter/…

People interested in maths e-assessment: I've been doing some nice work with scripted marking algorithms: github.com/christianp/mar…

@ben_nuttall I envy your pepper plant. Must be those warm southern climes

I get to add Karl-Mikael Perfekt to my list of Perfects-working-in-pure-maths, yeah? ntnu.edu/employees/karl…
All-time list now has 3 people!

Whichever brilliant architect put my building's ventilation inlet at ground level clearly didn't mind a good lungful of cigarette smoke

@Andrew_Taylor now you just need to order packages on ~100 different days, and establish how soon you can make a 95% confident prediction

Exponential notation: 2.2e-3 = 0.0022.

2.2e-3 is given to 2 sig. figs. But how many decimal places?

@NextLevelMaths I think you mean 5, but yes, that's the argument we came up with

@NextLevelMaths nope, you're right! off-by-one error by me

@walkingrandomly cheeky @FOTSN mug in the background there

@FOTSN scandal!

@FOTSN are those... biscuits of constant width?

@thinusp @mathsjampta I need to make another trip to Pretoria. Last time I was there on MathsJam night, protests prevented fun maths

@mathsjampta not likely to happen for a long while - there's a hemisphere between us!

I think today might be a two-lunch day

@ben_nuttall is holding on to your chin part of the process?

Yet again I find myself wanting a unary division symbol.

@paulscoombes no, ~x = 1/x

@RobJLow I did that at MathsJam a couple of years ago. It got a round of applause.

@RobJLow no more of a problem than the normal division operation

Just discovered you can long-press some icons on the Android homescreen (such as Twitter) to get a context menu. Not sure I'll ever use it

@JamesMoosh I have a nexus 5x, so whatever the latest version is. N?

Do you suffer from vertigo?

This morning: coding in special cases all over the place to cope with `sin^2(x)`.

Can anyone find that letter Babbage wrote complaining about the inconsistency of sin^2 notation?

@icecolbeveridge champion!

@icecolbeveridge winner!

Midday: removing all the special cases, retreating to Ice Fortress

Friends don't let friends use ambiguous notation twitter.com/ShemsiAlhaddad…

auuhh the current caller on the radio show I'm listening to repeats "yeah, yep" about 5 times every time she answers and it's driving me mad

Hah, the British Museum's 500 server error page has a picture of a broken pot from their collection on it

@ajk_44 and their furry companion, Dimensionless Dog

So *that's* how @evelynjlamb writes so many good maths articles: she's gone full-time! Meanwhile, @aperiodical filling up with tumbleweeds

Roses are red
Violets are blue
People seem to be riffing on this poem today
Why not me too?

Approved. twitter.com/chris_fairless…

@mutedestro @evelynjlamb @aperiodical if you find a tumbleweed with a non-trivial symmetry group, I'll write about it

Kurt Gödel
Always wore a girdle,
He was very insistent;
At the least, he was consistent.
#clerihew

@AndresCaicedo 🤢

@ChromeDevTools is there a key+click combo to set a conditional breakpoint on a line, rather than selecting from the context menu?

That's almost beautiful. twitter.com/mscroggs/statu…

It's aimed at school teachers, but this by @WorkEdgeChaos contains excellent advice for @NclNumbas question authors dropbox.com/s/ogis2bl8ib61…

@WorkEdgeChaos if it takes your fancy, I'd love your input on how Numbas could be adapted for use by schoolkids, eg. numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/exam/4439/gcse…

@WorkEdgeChaos you need to follow me first!

guess who just got caught out by twitter now sometimes not showing the @ username at the start of a reply

Just discovered that Hip Hop by Hocus Pocus is ideal music to juggle to youtube.com/watch?v=-HSmnI…

@aperfect crikey!

A calculus problem: @cabinetmagazine is perennially late publishing, but I'm even slower at reading them. Solution: decrease d(cabinets)/dt

Man with van to move sofa is late - would put me at risk of missing joiner, if he wasn't also late. I may not entertain any tradesmen today!

Enormous bird terrorises Canary Wharf

#lifehack twitter.com/hollykrieger/s…

@AklMathsJam did you manage to finish a game before running out of space?

If you fancy a bit of data analysis, or your students do, all the data from the "is this prime?" game is available: isthisprime.com/game/record.php

@kevin_tsang yes, you're probably one of the rogue lines in this plot. (see aperiodical.com/2016/05/are-yo…)

So you can tell them about the game, right? twitter.com/efrataitel/sta…

@scienceatlife the Bright Club event page says it's £4 per person, but the stand booking page says £5 + a £1 booking fee. What's going on?

@robeastaway yes

@robeastaway @icecolbeveridge alas, Feynman was in a couple of films and has a Bacon number of 3

@samholloway wow, there's something I'd almost completely forgotten!

@scienceatlife awfully kind of you! Yes please

Off to Edinburgh for two days! Don't suppose any maths friends will be around for dinner tonight?

Just passed a bison! In Northumberland!

@HilariousCow I recognise that feeling. Don't know a solution for it, but walking away from the problem for a while def helps

Good sentiment, but bad logic: keeping labour in Copeland probably won't save the hospital, since it won't change the government twitter.com/UKLabour/statu…

Does anyone else feel that the symmetry group of their wedding ring is bigger than it really is? I keep wanting to do a reflection

@robeastaway ooh, I might start talking about my income and expenditure in £Hz. e.g. Netflix costs 2.85 £μHz

@robinhouston is that rotations of a circle and a flip?

@robinhouston aha! I can never remember the names of those kinds of groups.

@Raspberry_Pi I've just applied!

Wow, @OnThisWeeksEpi is written by actual geniuses

@OnThisWeeksEpi oh wow, I thought it was a deliberate joke!

@OnThisWeeksEpi @leafarbuthnot in 2017, nobody can blame you for assuming the worst

@SLSingh I feel a strong compulsion to run that through photoshop's sharpen filter

@icecolbeveridge

Today :something with a 1/3 chance of happening happened 10 times in a row. 😕😟

So what are the odds? I reckon 3^9 and 3^10 are both decent answers, depending on your interpretation of "something". twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@RobJLow ... so?

@RobJLow yeah, I abused notation

@RobJLow maybe: roll a 3-sided die. I say "something a 1/3 chance of happening happened once" with probability: (?)

@RobJLow the difference is whether you're watching for a *particular* thing to happen 10 times, or any one thing with prob 1/3 to happen 10x

There must be some killer thermals above St James' Park today - I can see gulls circling up almost too high to see

@paulscoombes fairly sure, and the ones that are lower down are definitely gulls

What's the reasoning: two no-fault accidents where eejits drove into me in the past two years have increased my insurance quote by £70

line of reasoning is that I'm more likely to have another accident, but if they recoup all their costs from 3rd party what's the difference?

So pretty! twitter.com/biscuit_factor…

(if you're ever in the position of needing to buy my love, marbled paper is an all-access pass)

@JSEllenberg often, a good debugging tool can help you inspect the whole state of the program. Nothing wrong with a good print though

@sxpmaths yeah, but I couldn't find anything significantly cheaper, and the company I'm with *did* deal with aforementioned eejits well

@MEIMaths your wording was very slightly but crucially different: didn't say you only look at one side

@elinoroberts @scienceatlife exciting, but I'm wary of being near that many inventive nerds on April Fools' day

@natluurtsema thank you! I was trying to remember that word earlier. A bit too late to look clever in front of my wife though

@STEMNewcastle if you'd used the link for the actual post instead of the whole blog, this tweet would still make sense in the future

My name is Christian and I have a hyperboloid addiction

@ladydpw I work 4 days a week and took a 20% pay cut, so maybe don't follow my example

@CardColm and that's why subtle phrasing doesn't work on twitter

What's the penalty if you do it while driving on the right-hand side of the road, in Germany, like the picture shows? twitter.com/transportgovuk…

@mscroggs I am, alas, in that North. Anyway, I retired undefeated after the one I did attend. Hope it goes well!

@Pecnut oh no, that would leave me out of sorts for the rest of the week

I was expecting a combinatoric magic square with the broken edges, but it's just the arc lengths. Is the thing I imagined possible? twitter.com/_FutilityClose…

@pozorvlak that's exactly what's happening in that picture

@pozorvlak (apart from "straight-edged", but the pattern of edges is the same in every plate)

Today: downloading WireShark to work out why my websockets have suddenly stopped working, because they are completely opaque

They've taken a pound off my all-time favourite retail pricing joke!

@Mrrismithmaths en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/800-pound…

YIKES! twitter.com/TTRockStars/st…

@SLSingh there are a couple of images missing on your page of recommended maths books simonsingh.net/books/recommen…

If you'd never heard of a pie chart before, this *might* be an OK way of presenting this data. Still hard to pick out highest/lowest %s twitter.com/YouGov/status/…

YouGov presents this "favourite X" data like this quite often. It's missing measures of how "controversial" each item is, and more

I've done some thinking about this graphic. twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

*currently conceptualising the space of pizza topping combo preferences*

@LearningMaths no. It's because I'm concerned for the potential 33% of people who would have pineapple and olives together

@icecolbeveridge this isn't an open-and-shut case for the #mathspolice - I think this one may go to tribunal

@mattsmithetc would you like some thoughts about it beyond "it's not a pie chart"? aperiodical.com/2017/03/not-a-…

@aoibhinn_ni_s @UCDMathStat @SFIdiscover We tried a few of the more unusual methods a couple of years ago: aperiodical.com/2015/03/video-…

Here's my take on that Lissajous curves thing people are doing codepen.io/christianp/ful…

@dannytybrown is that fifth point in the same plane as the other four?

@dannytybrown in fact, there's no way the two pentagons can both be flat unless that point's in line with the other two, is there?

This is very relevant to my interests twitter.com/divbyzero/stat…

@numberphile has he managed to track down his half-brother, Terry Pi?

@sxpmaths I've just realised this leads on to the Thue-Morse sequence. Nice!

Don't put your phone on top of an empty tupperware unless you want to think a cargo ship is blowing its foghorn at you when it vibrates

Such a lovely evening!

This is making me very uncomfortable! twitter.com/panlepan/statu…

Best one yet twitter.com/qntm/status/83…

Just rang plusnet support. They seem to be storing my password in plain text - asked for two characters from it. 😨

@plusnethelp nope, home phone and broadband

This morning: investigating Blackboard Test. Currently: no idea what to do with this error message

BB test export stores MathML in an XML attribute by replacing <> with «» and double quotes with ¨ (that's a diaresis). WHAT COULD GO WRONG

when you upload questions in their stupid plaintext format, they recommend "at most 500" questions, to avoid timeouts. WHO WROTE THIS?

I assume more than one person was involved in designing and implementing this, so it's astonishing that none of them had heard of CDATA

Adventures in Mindlessly Copying and Pasting: Blackboard Docs Edition

I think whoever wrote this document got bored: none of the last 3 question types' descriptions come close to matching how they actually work

@robeastaway @SparksMaths fancy meeting up after the show tomorrow? I'll be attending the afternoon show

@robeastaway @SparksMaths if you need some refreshment at half time, @NCLMathsStats is having a pi day bake sale

@icecolbeveridge @WrongButUseful is it the bit where it sounds like your kids nick a motorbike?

@DavidKButlerUoA is that a frustrated frustrum?

@FOTSN maybe they routinely go 10% over budget?

@My_Metro can you give a link? Searching for "Metro" turns up lots of apps that aren't yours

@monsoon0 or watch the digits scroll past at three.onefouronefivenine.com

Today is π Day. If you need a quick reminder of the digits, they're all at three.onefouronefivenine.com

@RobJLow yes

@CDAXY @aperiodical starts at digit 762 - the Feynman point!

@SparksMaths I'm going to run back to my office to pick up my coat. Can we meet in the bar?

@SystemBread @tweetsauce in the same order? No - otherwise, your could write it as a fraction. Proof of that is longer than a tweet

@BrandonDriscoll @tweetsauce it's been there for two years already, so yes

@icecolbeveridge love the ", PhD". So American!

@icecolbeveridge (ps well done, that is a lovely cover, a masterpiece of the cumulonumbers form)

@rws91 want to bet?

@rws91 OK, show me where it ends

@rws91 the site doesn't end either

Can anyone think of a reason why, in MS Word, copying a picture copies it scaled down, but "save as picture" keeps the original size?

like, are there people who use Word to resize their pictures for them?

@moocowpong1 @SystemBread @tweetsauce ooh, not sure that's quite true. Certainly not with equal gaps. With any gap: yes, *very* slowly!

@moocowpong1 ah yes, you're right

@peterrowlett gee thanks!

@mathshewrote your profile pic is amazing! Did you draw it?

@evelynjlamb I interpreted it as the plural!

Another day, another failed attempt to get @NclNumbas to do arbitrary precision arithmetic.
It's just too complicated!

@Parcly_Taxel 1) no, this is javascript. 2) I have to change how numbers are used throughout the entire codebase

@Parcly_Taxel yes. But as I said, it's not simple to just plug in to a very big code base

@pkrautz I haven't. Would've been nice to set off from their code originally, but not worth the effort of moving now

Worked out why I can't request a book from the uni library: I have an overdue fine from 2010. I've definitely had books out since then.

I'm also pretty certain I paid that fine

@paulscoombes it was 7 years ago and a 60p fine, so no

@AdamCreen @DrBennison I think this is it, and @Wolfram_Alpha makes a good approximation wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2812…

@AdamCreen @DrBennison oh no, I need to divide by another thing, but my metro has just arrived

@AdamCreen @DrBennison check my working: easy to work out the prob of getting what you want in asc order. Multiply by number of permutations

@AdamCreen if I'd had more time, I would've done it in my head. There's a v cheap approximation to factorial via an integral

@paulscoombes luckily they don't add interest, but even to get to £1 now would require a 7.5% rate of compound interest

@pkrautz the what what?

@monsoon0 @panlepan @JustinAion also interesting: twin Towers of Hanoi. Start with two sets in different states; do the same moves on both

@panlepan @monsoon0 @JustinAion for any pair of towers, there's always a valid move

@stecks I did miss it! Why isn't it on the site?

@JanvierUK I can't help in this instance, but I think many of your interests will coincide with @futurebird's

@helenjbradley @jeremybradley isn't that basically calpol?

@MEIMaths yes but a tweet is too small to describe my solution

New sequence, inspired by @moocowpong1: A283714 = the digits of π found for the second time in π oeis.org/A283714

To what extent is integration harder than differentiation? Could you make a crypto system out of it?

@RobJLow exactly, so is there scope somewhere for a one-way function?

@ajk_44 me! I do!

@ajk_44 absolut. You've got my email, right?

So that's what they're for! twitter.com/mathemaniac/st…

@C_J_Smith frinkiac.com/gif/S07E02/678…

@DavidKButlerUoA ace t-shirt, but I'm not sure "vacancy" is strictly correct - every room can be occupied and you can still fit more people

@robeastaway I looked at the same problem with football stickers a few years ago. Swapping doubles helps a lot! plus.google.com/+ChristianPerf…

@peterrowlett @smarimc I think I got it from @Gelada, years and years ago

@CounterOfSheep and now I've got the theme from Earthworm Jim stuck in my head

Reading a book on modern computer algebra. tl;dr: Gauss knew it all.

@mrfranklinmaths @MEIMaths there are 15 Fermat levels?! I only have 12

@RobJLow and you've seen gaussfacts.com ?

How angry should I get about seeing the first version?

@dmswart thank you. Unchecked, I might have flipped untold tables

@bluecombats @ChalkDust @aperiodical hard to review with only one episode, but it was decent, and the presenters are nice

@Derektionary no - \ldots stands specifically for dots on the baseline, in contrast to \cdots. See tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7773…

@sxpmaths @Derektionary ah yes, I knew there was another set of macros but couldn't remember what they were!

@profkeithdevlin your article "Good stories, pity they're not true" has disappeared from the MAA website! Any idea where it is now?

I've started sorting my interesting esoterica collection into subtopics. How about some attention-grabbing titles? read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/collection/att…

Or things that are easy to explain read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/collection/eas…, or things to make and do read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/collection/thi…

@Pyfagorass Cor, thanks! 😊

@poveryant that's what I used to do! I was too ill to come this month - was it well attended?

@chalkdustmag the lack of a space here made me think it was a portmanteau with 'incontinent', and I shuddered to imagine what that meant

@aPaulTaylor @chalkdustmag or they tried to talk at a really awkward time?

We've got to stop promoting these unrealistic images of beaks full of fish on the covers of magazines. Pufflings are very impressionable! twitter.com/orange60/statu…

Just seen some true bravery: a dude carrying opened tins of paint in his brand new white audi

Phew! My spring-cleaning effort continues: all references on read.somethingorotherwhatever.com now have years of publication, where I could find them

In Middlesbrough tomorrow for @CodeClub training. Might fit in some maths sightseeing: lovemiddlesbrough.com/venues/temenos and thisisstockton.co.uk/attractions/in…

oh, and google maps doesn't recommend going over the transporter bridge as the "best" route. It is MISTAKEN

@AdamCreen ehh, it's a highlight for travel *inside Middlesbrough*. I wouldn't expand that to the wider UK.. or even the North East

My phone has bricked itself. I feel very odd! Thankfully, it's in warranty

The Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, aka "Beveridge's Law: the Journal" jasnh.com (via @ionicasmeets)

@icecolbeveridge ahhh, I mean Betteridge's law!

@icecolbeveridge I even looked it up on wikipedia, and my lying eyes must have skimmed over it!

"Every Metro car door opens 240k times per year" - @bbcnewcastle
Using this I estimate Airport to South Hylton takes 1 hour. Google agrees!

240k times/year, running 20h each day means every ~2 mins. Doors open at each stop. 30 stops on the line, so ~1 hour start to finish.

Surely a STEM graduate would have a more sophisticated calculator than that twitter.com/uksciencechief…

Having decided I'm going to have a dirty lunch in town today, I can think of nothing else.

@ColinTheMathmo @virgintrainsec one of many falsehoods programmers believe about names kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/fal…

@aperiodical (that's "scary" in the "don't get your hopes up just yet" sense, not the "something is not right" sense)

@CounterOfSheep getting square eyes seems an appropriate thing to do as you turn 36

This can not be a niche worth sitting in: an energy supplier catering specifically to Italian-language speakers in the UK

@C_J_Smith Ooooh that looks satisfying!

Compiling the index for my new calculus textbook illustrated with 3d stereograms, "Dot the Ts and Cross Your Eyes"

Tedious programming tweet ahoy!

I had a play with vue.js yesterday and I really like it. Had the opposite reaction to react.

An excellent article about what it's like to be autistic standardissuemagazine.com/voices/see-not…

Happy morning listening to, as one odious class mate put it in freshers' week, "music women listen to as they put their tampons in"

@mscroggs congratulations!

@icecolbeveridge this is a good law

@JimPropp @haggismaths while we're talking -ians, I've always enjoyed saying "Grassmannian". Algebraic structures are fun too: magmas, monoids, presheaves

it's been a week and I still haven't seen a new pound coin. Polyhedral currency is still just a beautiful dream to me

@standupmaths anyway, shouldn't you want salt to be less easy to absorb? We have too much salt anyway.

Judging by the smell in this travelodge's corridors, it's common to smoke your dope as soon as you've bought it

This is making me anxious

It looks like mastodon is picking up, but signups are locked on the main instance. Behold! Too many to choose from: instances.mastodon.xyz twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@ColinTheMathmo @robeastaway this is one of those knowing-there's-an-answer-is-a-clue situations: if points are arbitrary, move them to the corners

@peterrowlett Yeah, it's a shot in the dark at the moment, but many people are using octodon.social

@enchantedloom Earlier in the year the Express had a headline "16C scorcher!"
Incredible even for them

@peterrowlett @ColinTheMathmo Ehh, it's like a mix of the web and email: whatever you put out will stay out, and the domain is a proper part of your ID

@peterrowlett @ColinTheMathmo I think it needs the ability to merge names across instances in case one shuts down , and then it'll become something you can commit to

I've made use of mastodon's massive character limit to post an oddity I've found to do with π: mastodon.social/@christianp/21…

@peterrowlett I suppose a week ago I would've put it on my beta blog. Not an aperiodical post because 15 minutes later I worked out our was boring

@sangwinc sorry we couldn't make it. Don't suppose any of it'll be recorded?

@DrLucyRogers Wonder if a program could categorise what you're writing based on words/hour. Low: poetry, love letter; high: fantasy novel, angry comment

@matheknitician ooooooh I like the 3D one a lot!

@ajk_44 @FOTSN nearly-snap! I had mine on yesterday

@stecks have you seen mathematische-basteleien.de/eggcurves.htm?

@stecks @ajk_44 @FOTSN detachable pigtails as a concept, or me with detachable pigtails?

@stecks @ajk_44 @FOTSN PS why is your video not an @aperiodical post

Thanks to @mathsjem on the latest @WrongButUseful for alerting me to numdic.com. Shows more facts than numbergossip.com

@solvemymaths @mathsjem @WrongButUseful "if brackets remain expanded for longer than 3 hours, speak to your doctor"

@icecolbeveridge that binomial expansion makes me feel queasy. I'll stick with completing the square.

I have made it through the work day and only eaten four of my five allotted cookies.

Reward: a cookie.

@C_J_Smith Are they given an example of what minutes should look like?

@Gelada It's only fair that the reward is proportional to how good I am

Why does the royal mint website not know about the new pound coin? royalmint.com/discover/uk-co…

Here's how to make every amount up to £3.88 with the fewest coins codepen.io/christianp/ful…

Taking this bag of coins to the bank. Any guesses how much it's worth? It's not much deeper than what you can see

@jiyameng couple of kilos

All guesses in the £40 range. Odd.
In order of accuracy:
@jiyameng £40.96
@Bishnavitch £43.40
@GreyAlien £45.

Actual value: £60.92! Wow!

@jamestanton Your most successful nerdsnipe in a while. codepen.io/christianp/pen…

@sxpmaths I wrote a few @NclNumbas questions similar to this a few weeks ago. They had much less fun framing than this though

The ceiling at my dad's house is like a quake level with a million bad brush errors

I'm holding my first three dodecagonal pounds and they were all minted in 2016. @peterrowlett was it you who said 2016s are rare?

#spuriouscorrelations

@quaristice may I reuse this photo in a post on aperiodical.com?

@quaristice thanks!

We had a lovely day out at @NTcragside today. The granddads-per-square-metre measurement was off the charts!

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-396823…
This makes me suspect that the eejit who suggested that awful stone last time is still employed by the Labour party

@tonikenergy just submitted my first meter readings to you. The form strips out decimal dots; I almost sent 10x the real values 😬 Dangerous!

@DrLucyRogers ... but you only had a 5.25" drive, and that's when you woke up?

@philipcball Related, those lazy images of floaty digits/notation, e.g. uk.pinterest.com/katiesteckles/…. Have you noticed this? I call it "cumulonumbers"

@misosusanowa @DrLucyRogers sudden flashback to PC Zone magazine launching with **HD floppy disks!!!**
Funny what you can get excited about when you're little

@philipcball yes, now you mention it I do sometimes swat theatrically at the equations as they float by, before shouting "Eureka!"

@icecolbeveridge @CounterOfSheep no, he lives very close to the bus depot

@NewcastleCC @YouTube that address doesn't work without www. in front of it.

@tim_hunt that doesn't look like a link to a PDF

@DavidKButlerUoA immediately reminded me of cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/don…, on a purely superficial basis

#me_irl

@jamestanton I think it's p/(p-1). This tweet is too small etc. etc.

@WanderingPoint @jamestanton Yes, 1/(p-1) is right. I spotted a 1/p at the start and promptly forgot about it!

Didn't think I wanted a rabbit update, but this one delivered twitter.com/charliesgames/…

We're watching the 1st series of Location, Location, Location. The production: hilarious. Following along with today's prices on Zoopla: not

"Strong against the weakest and weak against the strongest" is a lovely bit of chiasmus. Finally a decent bit of rhetoric! twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/s…

Shuffle a pack of cards. Deal into piles, starting a new pile when you see a card already in the current pile.
Expected number of piles?

@icecolbeveridge yes, same rank

Yes twitter.com/balrogz/status…

@JanvierUK by giving away so much you end up in a state where someone else would give charity to you

Before GitHub, has anyone else built a billion-dollar company on a product whose name is a swearword?

Wait. I, a person who has vowed never to swear, have put myself in a situation where I retweet swearwords all morning. Oops.

@icecolbeveridge I vowed.

@stecks the world is awash with inopportunely-named open source projects

This is an excellent animation. Next challenge: convert general dot drawing to a scatter plot with given stats twitter.com/JustinMatejka/…

How to end ads on the internet: get your ad blocker to silently follow every single ad link, ruining clickthrough analytics

(assuming you want that to happen and you use an ad blocker. I don't)

Opportunity to use the phrase "totally tropical" in a maths paper: missed by a hair's breadth. arxiv.org/abs/1606.00238

Just found this nice paper via the arXivist on how to make polyhedra out of PVC pipes arxiv.org/abs/1705.00100

Also via the arXivist: this paper which is very relevant to my 2016 @MathsJam conference compo arxiv.org/abs/1704.08483

Yet again, my decision not to bother getting a PhD is justified by someone opening an email with "Dear Dr Lawson-Perfect".

Question for people like @Raspberry_Pi and @DrLucyRogers: has anyone already written the necessaries to pass your phone's mic audio to a Pi?

.@Raspberry_Pi @DrLucyRogers This might work: if I can get the Pi to pretend to be a bluetooth speaker, this app claims to stream the phone mic play.google.com/store/apps/det…

RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS twitter.com/evelynjlamb/st…

@evelynjlamb minus points for that post linking to the paper at an NY library URL which doesn't even tell me its title unless I log in

@evelynjlamb I mean, when a headline says "all mammals poop in 12 seconds", I immediately have anecdata (N=1) that that's not true

@NYULibraries a blog post sent me to ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:3010/en/content/art…, which I'm not allowed to see. Could it at least show the title of the thing?

@evelynjlamb @benorlin If he can paint and form friendships, he can have affected speech, right? Maybe Data is a massive hipster

@evelynjlamb doesn't apply to continuously-pooping mammals like rabbits or guinea pigs. I've been sold a bill of goods!

Hey @PopSci, what's the title of the paper this article is about? popsci.com/everyone-poops
Link in the post goes to NYU, which I can't see

@NYULibraries I don't! Thanks though. Is there a URL the post author could have used to show non-privileged people metadata about the paper?

@evelynjlamb Read the paper, I'm even less happy. Better stated as "no correlation between weight and poo time". Observed times between 2 and 27 seconds!

@NYULibraries I've got a copy now, thanks. Showing what I've been directed to before asking for a login would be good UX.

@haggismaths And here's the paper itself epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.113…

Is there such a thing as cat's cradle with two strings? (or, in this case, laccy bands)

@icecolbeveridge huh? It's just a sign error: -10T=-17.5T etc. means distance travelled is in the same direction as initial velocity. Should be -10T=17.5T...

@icecolbeveridge and the acceleration is in the same direction as the distance travelled, so should be negative. Who sold you this formula? Get a refund!

@icecolbeveridge ah, I used u and didn't spot you hadn't. So is it a coincidence that 5/7 turns up both ways round? I'm lost in a maze of signs

@icecolbeveridge That's what I first thought, but I convinced myself it wasn't quite it. I think I meant changing v without changing u or s, but that breaks

@GirlGeekUpNorth @ben_nuttall @Raspberry_Pi Is that photo of @ThinkPhysicsNE in Northumbria Uni? I got excited and then noticed the event is in Manchester :(

Lovely bit of working. And I didn't know Spanish used a translated form of Q.E.D.! twitter.com/MelvinPerezCx/…

@reflectivemaths @srcav @icecolbeveridge The most charitable I can be is to interpret "x^2 - y^2" as "x^2 to y^2", and the factorisations would range from x*x to y*y.

Did I dream about voting yesterday, or has BBC News forgotten that North Tyneside had a mayoral election? bbc.co.uk/news/topics/42…

Oh look, an article titled "Council and mayoral elections: Are they being forgotten?" on... BBC News!
bbc.co.uk/news/election-…

@peterrowlett @icecolbeveridge @reflectivemaths in that case, [stuff] would be "this part of the expression"

@warwick_hunt79 But there are "not yet declared" entries for other elections

North Tyneside maybe-a-dream-election update: our (good) Labour mayor was re-elected with a swing away from the Tories. Hooray!

Oh great, I've got this stuck in my head again
youtube.com/watch?v=l7iVsd…

(it's really great, I meant what I said)

If it's only 10C outside, why am I walking the dog in just a t-shirt?

There's always one twitter.com/RealityMinus3/…

There are often two twitter.com/adamcreen/stat…

Sometimes, when the stars align and you choose your words particularly poorly, there are three twitter.com/ChrisMaslanka/…

@evelynjlamb Douady certainly had a theme: he coined "carrot fields" read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/Petersen…

Excellent! twitter.com/stecks/status/…

@peterrowlett I mean, those are both killer features for me

@icecolbeveridge Print? Pencil?

@peterrowlett @tombutton Yeah, only works on the website

@tombutton @peterrowlett on android, you can put the website on your homescreen, and it acts like an app

@pkrautz @ColinTheMathmo @tombutton @peterrowlett @MathJax Because of the protocol: toots can only be plain text, and clients show images as attachments at the bottom

Ooooooh! twitter.com/MrTilston/stat…

@sangwinc @colinfoster77 alas, another article in a journal Newcastle doesn't subscribe to!

Over on mathstodon.xyz, people are making good use of the sensitive content button not for politics or triggers, but MATHS SPOILERS

A bit of default male in this localised mailshot from Open Britain?

@jjaron Hey, if it means she loses against all the odds, I can put up with it

@SparksMaths @MegaMenger It'll be alright Ben, in time your memories of it will have measure zero.

@Pecnut American parking signs are an information design nightmare

@robeastaway I'd love to know what percentage of the economy is accounted for by inattentive consumers

I need to show Y1-Y4 kids fun maths next week. I have flexagons and 1089 already. Ideas please, @MathsRoadshow @robeastaway @nrichmaths

@robeastaway @MathsRoadshow @nrichmaths what's the twenty game?

@helenjwc @robeastaway @MathsRoadshow @nrichmaths it's a careers event: I'm to show them what a mathematician does. But my primary teacher wife has said I should have tricks up my sleeve

@helenjwc @MathsRoadshow @robeastaway @nrichmaths (I mentioned them in my original tweet)

@helenjwc they're going to ask me some questions, and then I thought I could demonstrate mathematical thinking via mathemagic or things like flexagons

Are you as excited about #eurovision as me? Have *you* made an online judging thingy so you can award nul points? somethingorotherwhatever.com/nulpoints/

😍 twitter.com/TPalmer207/sta…

#eurovision watching friends: if you want to play along with judging the songs in a whizzy way, I made a thingy somethingorotherwhatever.com/nulpoints

We've just discovered it doesn't work on iPhones. Rats.

@jjsanderson @gwydionuk It's banned in our house because I developed a problem. Incoming patak's jars are examined very closely by the relevant authority

I was impressed by google translate, then not so impressed, then fascinated

@geogebra this problem has reared its head again: help.geogebra.org/topic/web-appl…
Where's the right place to file it? Could I fix it?

@mcmwright @CardColm you'd have trouble getting out of Newcastle - no canals up here!

@standupmaths there's been a mix-up: you've got Zorro's order

@C_J_Smith all my marking is done automatically by computers, which means I'm spending this week configuring computers 😕

@extremefriday @JohnDCook That's the best description of grobner bases I've seen so far!

Current status.

#hexaflexagon #debugface

@mikegibson2010 @twMetro Yeeeeikes!

I'm going to Amsterdam in a fortnight. What mathsy sights should I see while I'm there?

@bmansdahl thank you very much!

Phew! 😌
36 @NCLMathsStats hexaflexagons, ready to be flexed and hexed by kids tomorrow. (bonus binary numbers magic trick in the background)

@standupmaths bahh, I'll be there on Saturday. Don't suppose you're around that long?

Some giddy students high on maths fumes have commandeered these whiteboards to say "THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS 7! (Fermat)" #revisionflotsam

Mind blown watching Location^3, as a couple in the South pay <inconceivable sum> for <terrible house>

@AdamCreen @CardColm 1) semantics 😒
2) that's a kind of equation

@mscroggs Take your pick from the aperiodical?

Before visiting a primary school today, I asked them to draw a mathematician. I think this one is @stecks!

@standupmaths And it makes a nice non-alcoholic alternative to wine at a meal

We're on our way to Edinburgh to see @henryseg's Brilliant Geometry exhibition summerhall.co.uk/visual-arts/br…

Those are some capital-L Looming rain clouds!

@standupmaths @stecks Easy!

@standupmaths @stecks Alright, Johnny Five-Pounds!

@stecks @standupmaths The video ref has disallowed that one on the grounds it's completely naff

@IMAmaths well, I have...

@sxpmaths You've got a paper copy!!! I only have a dejavu file of dubious origin

Oooh! trido.co.uk

Aaaah! productdesignaward.eu/winners/winner…

A sign to strike fear into the hearts of teachers everywhere

Is anyone doing proper modelling of seat counts for the election, instead of just national percentages?

Pretty pleased with this card I made for @aperfect's birthday, which is today. Because he's so old he didn't get the top right corner.

Discovering Malcolm Swan's material today thanks to #malcolmswanday. This statement isn't necessarily true: assumes straight cut?

@SylviaFysica @peterrowlett @NewtonInstitute @Quendus @divbyzero @SwedeWhite @PaulSecular they wanted a link to Cambridge, and Conway was at Cambridge while developing GoL

These days happen. Like a roller-coaster almost stopping at the top, they're necessary. twitter.com/extremefriday/…

@JanvierUK if it dries out quickly, mould can't grow on it. See also aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/…

@CardColm crikey, that as well as the other two dishes?

@Raspberry_Pi @jjsanderson @biglesp or, in short, Wasberry Pi

Today on mathstodon.xyz, the Interesting Esoterica bot has tooted a paper on my absolute fave puzzle mathstodon.xyz/@esoterica/413…

The wife just did bunny fingers while saying "democracy". Now want to know if she has a badly printed zine I can read for more jaded views

(bunny fingers were prompted by our discussion of the first-past-the-post system. She's got a point.)

Help help a wicked witch visited in the night and turned me into a millennial

Dog election update

Spare room change of usage referendum update

Funniest misspelling of 'lad' plebiscite update

Best wedding thingy ever! twitter.com/jiyameng/statu…

I've been rinsing Dutch on duolingo. It's true what they say - it's basically German and English with some left-field nonsense thrown in

@MarcusduSautoy Hah, I'm in Amsterdam on Wednesday! I guess I'll never know what the book is about

@ajk_44 @MathsRoadshow Conversely, people started taking me seriously at a worryingly young age, and some people think I'm still in my early 20s!

@ajk_44 A bad thing from the conference we organised: put out free coffee on first morning, then no coffee the next morning. Unhappy campers!

There's dialling a wrong number, and there's accidentally dialling my UK number instead of the Indian one you want. I can't imagine how.

@ajk_44 @plusmathsorg @MathsRoadshow yeah, wine at a conference puts me off

Somebody might have made a large diversion on his Welsh holiday to visit Tenby museum because of this... (it has some lovely calculators!) twitter.com/notonlyahatrac…

@eleonorasfalcon Correct! Many fine eateries too

I'm going to retreat to the mountains and contemplate this joke for a while. It's perfect. twitter.com/macaronique/st…

There are some lovely things to play with at NEMO science museum

(that's @NEMOamsterdam) and of course no Dutch science museum would be complete without a dam building exhibit

Seen you, @stecks

My glass is modelled on the new £1 coin

@stecks Humbly report I didn't look inside. A marvellous set of bronze platonic solids caught my eye...

😱 twitter.com/icecolbeveridg…

It might look like someone did their queueing theory wrong, but this enormous queue down the length of Schiphol terminal 2 cleared quickly!

@CardColm Newtons per metre squared multiplied by metres squared

Yes! Landed one minute before we set off! #timezonegoals

@ColinTheMathmo Yes but I can't play this year because the weekend is our due date!

@standupmaths Tanya Khovanova has more fun maths (referencing you) about the best way to share a pile of things: blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2017/06/fair-s…

That's a proper speech, that. twitter.com/OwenJones84/st…

Our new PVC sending his monthly newsletter through a commercial service instead of the uni's own mailing list. Not sure how to interpret.

@robinhouston I've never been able to convince myself that unrolling preserves the length.

My life: the comic strip qwantz.com/index.php?comi…

@mathyadriana That is a lovely room!

@mathforge @robinhouston It's the cartesian product bit I have trouble with. I assume that's an easy fact viewed from the right vantage point

@mathforge @robinhouston Thank you!

@MarcusduSautoy do you know what happened to the non-Oxford data from the old site? I'm interested in archiving it if possible

@numberphile have you seen this? A lovely little bit of speculative maths spelunking found the terrific number 13532385396179 twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

@robeastaway my speedrun record for the old-style GCSE is under 20 minutes. Not sure how I'd do with a new one

@robeastaway I've just done this AQA paper 1 specimen in 24 minutes, but my brain is mush and I forgot the circle theorem for q21 filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/math…

@robeastaway in conclusion: the questions are much harder!

I got polled on Monday night. As a highly-educated Labour voter in the North East, I don't think I swung it much. twitter.com/jjaron/status/…

What kind of question is "what's the naughtiest thing you've ever done?" What would a good answer be?

@numberphile @aperiodical I can give you his email address. No idea other than that, sorry.

The pricing of bus tickets in Newcastle seems to be a process best summed up as "pick a number between 1 and 3 pounds when someone gets on"

Time for another instance of my favourite game: oh-god-did-I-defo-put-the-cross-in-the-labour-box-or-am-I-a-massive-moron

Is.... google.... down? Everything else is working for me but Google Maps and search aren't responding.

@efrataitel so no, then. Or not for you, at least

@icecolbeveridge @robeastaway He says, suspiciously a day later 😉

Sneaky hyperbolic plane spotted in Durham's maths building after @henryseg's talk

@JSEllenberg Not sure that would be helpful, since the results are very much not independent. (PS they're constituencies not districts)

@MouldS That always annoys me!

As surely as night follows day, the general election is followed by the resignation of the leader of UKIP twitter.com/BBCBreaking/st…

So Scots tories want to split from the English tories but not Scotland to split from UK. One of those lake-on-an-island-on-a-lake scenarios

Welp, it's started: adverts for baby things appearing on every page I visit.

Clopen All Hours twitter.com/peterrowlett/s…

Waiting to find out how Cedric Villani did in the French legislative election. I *think* the result will appear here leparisien.fr/elections/legi…

@jjsanderson Don't look up his majority. I hit things when it came up on the live feed

I've spent the morning typing up explanations of maths jokes for an outreach event
checkmyworking.com/misc/jokes/
If you know more, tell 'em to me!

A classic!

I've just realised my mentions is going to be full of cheesy maths jokes for the foreseeable... twitter.com/bewdyrooster/s…

I think retweeting these will help spread the pun load.

Keep them coming! twitter.com/LearningMaths/…

@MrsOClee @LearningMaths aw man, I forgot to put MathJax in!

I'm moderately pleased with this impossible-looking quadratic equations question in @NclNumbas: numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/question/22460…

@NclNumbas ("impossible" if you can't do big sums or multiplication)

@Parcly_Taxel @NclNumbas Well, quite - but plugging the numbers into the quadratic formula is not a good way to go. That's the point of it.

@kevin_tsang @NclNumbas ahhh, whoops!

This video's got it all: cumulonumbers, Cédric Villani, DONALD DUCK IN MATHMAGIC LAND twitter.com/InHenriPoincar…

"Are you ready for winter" advert on the metro. I know our summers are short up here, but that's really pushing it!

@extremefriday Maybe they mean Five-Percenters? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Perc…

@JamesMoosh @NclNumbas (now fixed)

@peterrowlett Just an old word, I think

@evelynjlamb does it help to report spam sites reproducing your blog posts? aboromedia.com/ai/2017/06/16/…

@elinoroberts @theAliceRoberts That would be massively unlikely, wouldn't it?

Wow, that packs a punch. Such a powerful image twitter.com/UKDemockery/st…

There was a mixup with the shopping list and now we've triggered the summer's blockbuster event, CRISIS ON INFINITE BANANAS

Fuzzable might make a good middle name for the forthcoming LP twitter.com/LaurieStories/…

Doing indecent things to a minimilk

I've just discovered that Cambridge put a lot of their undergrad maths notes on the web maths.cam.ac.uk/notes-web

Just noticed that github.com/numbas/Numbas/… has 420 closed issues.

xX_420_Cl0sE_iT_Xx

@icecolbeveridge @WWMGT is there something neat about this that I wouldn't see by brute forcing it?

@ChrisMaslanka obvious in hindsight!

Finally getting back to looking at the cool new marking algorithms feature for @NclNumbas, while my interns work away on transition material

@evelynjlamb Is it two square antiprisms stuck together?

@evelynjlamb @panlepan Those squares didn't look flat to me. Cuboctahedron would be a good guess - easy to look up the working-out for edge lengths

@standupmaths @thinkmaths Can you arrange a golomb ruler to knock out an interesting sequence of measurements as you sharpen the pencil?

@MathsInspiratn A vector diagram showing the direction of flow of maths?

@jjaron There's a grim way of being reminded about skedasticity.
Also: we're poor up here, but at least we're *all* poor

!!!!!!!!!! twitter.com/octonion/statu…

@icecolbeveridge It's the Culture Club function

I've got a fiver, a tenner and a twenty in my wallet. Sorely tempted to get a fifty out just to complete the set

@FOTSN We'll be Baby minus 1 week on the night you're in Durham. Has nerdity ever induced labour?

@FOTSN smooth

@MouldS "Time of day" looks perfectly good to me, and unambiguous

That might actually help me remember the definition of noetherian twitter.com/FactsOfMath/st…

@rjallain @panlepan @Derektionary There's a place where your dream comes true: mathstodon.xyz

How have I never seen Erich Friedman's Math Magic page before? Monthly recreational maths puzzles www2.stetson.edu/~efriedma/math…

More journal website unusability. Where do I click to view the paper? Took me 10-20 seconds.

A web-based tool to get readable alt text as well as an SVG, PNG, or MathML for a bit of LaTeX maths twitter.com/pkrautz/status…

I'd be wary of anyone who had a scar and couldn't vividly remember how they got it! twitter.com/gretchenrubin/…

Turns out I need to check my no-unexplained-scars privilege

Sad: Newcastle @MathsJam is on hiatus. I'm rarely there because of Family. Who in the North East is interested? mathsjam.com/cities/newcast…

I'm now in day 4 of Deep Code Plumbing, and beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I need something fun to do after this!

@Dragon_Dodo #raisedbywolves

@Parcly_Taxel umm? Not sure. What's special about it?

News to me! This is actually fascinating: look at that dependency graph change en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_… twitter.com/Parcly_Taxel/s…

There's a baffling simulator of Setun at trinary.ru/projects/setun…, though Fowler's ternary calculator's more my speed mortati.com/glusker/fowler… twitter.com/Gelada/status/…

Is it too early to drop hints for whoever gets me in Secret Santa this year? presentandcorrect.com/collections/no…

Providing a valuable public service. twitter.com/chalkdustmag/s…

@_tim_hutton_ Haha!

Ikea PRØDIGY twitter.com/FOTSN/status/8…

I had a fascinating chat with David about his work with topos theory and the continuum hypothesis. twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

A story on the BBC where "you" isn't assumed to be white, Christian, etc. etc.!!!
Very welcome.

A rare glimpse of the Coastal Woof Shark, seen here in her native habitat

First in to coin "stochastic communism" twitter.com/darrenglass/st…

@helenarney my brain just misinterpreted the tour name and leapt to a follow-up, "You Can't French A Nerd". Other nationalities that are also verbs?

Mental maths error, or essay from the future?
Source: bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…

Turns out
1) my wife never watched the crystal maze
2) now I'm making her watch it, she can't bear it
I thought we were soul mates!

I'd never heard of Genaille rods before. How gloriously impractical!
youtu.be/JCUPFZ0iH_s

I need an epidemiologist: have I fought off the vomiting bug, or has the vomiting bug allowed me to live?

@JanvierUK *hugs*

Seems you can't press Shift+Delete to remove a bad autocomplete from the Chrome address bar any more. Boo!

Brings to mind read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/NoThisis… twitter.com/hnodrog/status…

@FOTSN Nice, but I couldn't in good conscience wear a t-shirt which reports a fraction out of 16 to four sig figs

@FOTSN Oh man, I could talk at length about why it's worse than unnecessary. AT LENGTH

Wait... you got me!

Wikipedia: the text adventure is surprisingly fun. I started at Stonehenge and I'm trying to get to London. Currently near Basingstoke

Going to see if I can get to the London Eye. I know roughly where it is in London, but will wikipedia be too dense to find it?

I'm stuck outside Windsor in a maze of twisty golf championships, all alike

@samholloway takes you to Colossal Cavern, Kentucky. Nice reference, but scuppers me!

@samholloway that's not a verb I recognise

Wahey!!!

@AdamCreen I think I might be. Give me a hint?

@AdamCreen sounds very vaguely familiar. I don't think I've played it

I like it VERY MUCH!
brb, recreating for a variety of outfits twitter.com/PyViv/status/8…

@jjsanderson Have you seen this? publicdomainreview.org/collections/al…

All the estate security policies in the world won't stop me buzzing a man with a palette of müller corners into the building

Ooh, it's the princess in a castle problem!
I made an interactive version years ago checkmyworking.com/misc/princess-… twitter.com/alexbellos/sta…

@ColinTheMathmo it can only ever be too late to say that

My mother informs me @mathbabedotorg was very good talking about maths on Start the Week this morning. bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08…

@mathbabedotorg I quote: "she says the things CP says about maths".
No higher praise from the matriarch P

Don't let balloons fly away, guys! twitter.com/SteelySeabirde…

I searched for somebody with the surname "Emba" and now I'm getting a million adverts for MBAs

Never forget what a poset is again, by looking at your knick-knacks! twitter.com/PyViv/status/8…

Over on Mathstodon, David Eppstein is looking for maths papers with lots of authors mathstodon.xyz/@11011110/1012…
I found one with 13!

@DrSaraSantos I've read the rational tangles paper loads of times but never quite believed it. I think I need to do it for real. Does it really work?

I dream of a future where I'll be able to put an exclamation mark after a digit and nobody will make the canonical "joke" twitter.com/bit_player/sta…

To paraphrase Churchill, putting an exclamation mark after a digit is something up with which you will not put? twitter.com/theoremoftheda…

@nickteff nice! My script broke at some point after finding 13 and I lost interest. How did you find that one?

@standupmaths @QMUL @thinkmaths have you seen this thing I made? christianp.github.io/hexaflexagon/
I think it'll be right up your street

@mathforge @DrSaraSantos read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/Davis2012

@mathforge @DrSaraSantos Well, I have a "things to make and do" category read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/collection/thi…

Google claims I walked 100km last month. That's about 3km per day. I can't decide if that's a reasonable estimate or not.

@peterrowlett I reckon that's directly relevant. We have the same thing on Newcastle's campus to deter bike thieves

@standupmaths @stecks Breaking news! You can do much, much better, with magnets archive.bridgesmathart.org/2017/bridges20…

@icecolbeveridge @Dragon_Dodo @RealityMinus3 @aga_furtak TIL purple is one of the Set colours.

Browsing GitHub, I've come across a package offering "stateless login". That sounds like an oxymoron.

It's only just occurred to me that rather than weighing up which of the two local foodbanks would benefit most, I could just donate to both

@drvinceknight (hastily written) Makefiles

Early career researchers: have you been bullied into doing bad science? There's a letter to sign bulliedintobadscience.org

@helenjbradley I think that's one of the lines from that Alanis Morissette song

@evelynjlamb I get 72F = 22C, which is quite warm! We have our thermostat at home set to 19C = 66F which I'll admit is on the low side, but come on!

@evelynjlamb I see, so you don't need to adjust your clothing too much when you come in

@outofthenorm2 @icecolbeveridge @Dragon_Dodo @RealityMinus3 @aga_furtak 😱

@CounterOfSheep It's fascinating watching you do all this thinking about your autistic self as an adult, when I did the same as a teenager.

@mathsjem yes! I typed up a whole page of maths jokes last week, with explanations too! checkmyworking.com/misc/jokes

@CDAXY @mathsjem I have not! I'll keep an eye out for it

@k_houston_math You are having much more success promoting an artistic outlook than I am!

@k_houston_math Oh, it's the guy who was at matrix! I really liked his work!

Some good news I didn't expect to read any time soon! twitter.com/kayaburgess/st…

One fine day with a woof and a purr, a baby was Bourne and it caused a little stir twitter.com/jkeefe/status/…

Annoyed but delighted to see that my summer students somehow on my day off doubled the number of @NclNumbas questions I need to proofread

Oh hey, the Home Office made a poster exactly describing my design style github.com/UKHomeOffice/p…
PS that "raining cats and dogs" icon is 👌

in other news, thanks to the Home Office for reminding I was going to write captions for the @NclNumbas screencasts

@RobJLow Well yes, good accessibility helps everyone, but items 2, 3 and 4 are particularly important with ASD

This is an element of oeis.org/A113797, added to the OEIS in 2006. twitter.com/wilderlab/stat…

@eAssess wot, no "it cost a tonne of money and is at the wrong end of the country"?

@eAssess but my travel budget is so small!

@eAssess ah, we thought we had to attend the dinner. Wasn't clear.

@monsoon0 I can do you "non-Euclidean geometry for babies" amazon.co.uk/Non-Euclidean-…

@standupmaths you're contributing to autocorrect resistance. Always complete the course!

I've just seen "another words" instead of "in other words". Is this common? I can hear the similarity, but can't imagine how to justify it

@sxpmaths do you have a file per section?

@kevin_tsang I'm aware of eggcorns. In this instance, I can't see how you'd think "another words" makes sense.

@sxpmaths could you make something like a Makefile which produces a wrapper just to compile one section?

Oh myyy twitter.com/pikesley/statu…

@sxpmaths a quick google turned up a package which claims to make this easier: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7052…

TFW you're involved with so many different projects involving @stecks that you have four different messaging windows open to her at once

@alicekeeler @Thalesdisciple @monsoon0 @joboaler yes, I have issues with the book itself. But the title is fun!

@CardColm It's a bit mad that it doesn't exist.

@stecks You need the http bit
talkingmathsinpublic.uk

@stecks those losers?

@stecks my continued fraction approximation says your capacity is either 35 or 486. Suspect it's somewhere in between

@stecks

Five years later, this video I recorded about a mad way of representing SKI calculus got its first comment youtube.com/watch?v=fZQMmg…

Wahey! Just passed 50 @NclNumbas questions ready to use, created by my summer students. Only another 58 more to check...

As an academic, my pay offer this year is 1.7%, while my teacher wife's is 1%. In 29 years, my 0.8 FTE salary will catch up with hers

(ignoring pay scales, and assuming the rates of increase stay the same, which they defo won't)

But thanks to inflation at 2.9%, our combined pay will by then only be worth 64% of what it is today

Supplementary question: have I given enough information for you to work out the ratio of our salaries?

@eleonorasfalcon If I was working full-time, I'd be earning slightly more than her. Not much though.

I've just had an interesting discussion with a student. Too long for twitter, so described at length on mathstodon: mathstodon.xyz/@christianp/11…

Oh no, I'm trying to solve a boolean satisfiability problem! At least I know I can give up on looking for a fast, optimal solution.

@pozorvlak yes, so I need to look one up, rather than staring at my problem hoping for an optimal algorithm to pop out

where in the hierarchy of understanding does "I know just enough about this to be pedantic about it on twitter" lie?

@DrLucyRogers Bit grim but I like it

It turns out Taylor's paper on this was one of the first entries in Interesting Esoterica! read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/Socolar2… twitter.com/christlet/stat…

How much effort would it be for BBC Sport to change their "Cricket" label to "Men's Cricket", since that's what it apparently means?

Increasing the number of people who will need treatment in the future is apparently preferable to letting people die now, but fewer of them twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/s…

or, reject the false dichotomy and properly fund the health service, but that doesn't seem to be on the cards for the current government

I need to look at the number of questions approved for use instead of the number still to check, because both are growing #checkathon2017

🙇 twitter.com/stecks/status/…

This morning is an Alice Smith morning

@ruimvieira ooh, now I want to make something which creates epochs with reasonable-sounding start times that coincide with lots of historical events

Today's editing trick: whenever students have used a name in a question statement, randomise it to a male or female one.

I think now is the time to write a @NclNumbas extension which gives you a random name and pronoun, picking uniformly from gender and culture twitter.com/ajk_44/status/…

omg someone named their baby "Json" in 2015 babycenter.com/baby-names-jso…

@ruimvieira it's just not getting the same traction in the mainstream

@Andrew_Taylor deprecated in ES2017

@Andrew_Taylor I just meant the message is deprecated...

@Andrew_Taylor a linter is like someone who insists on applying Latin grammar to English. Once you know enough to be confident, safely ignore.

@Andrew_Taylor but I would recommend looking for a way of doing things that doesn't involve extending built-in prototypes

Rejecting the gender binary is leading me down some funny paths, such as this stackoverflow question stackoverflow.com/questions/2161…

OK, how about this? Have I got the rule for gender-neutral verb conjugation right?

@DavidKButlerUoA @samholloway @ajk_44 I wrote this in the readme to the extension. There are more categories than just gender, so let the computer take it out of your hands

@DavidKButlerUoA @samholloway @ajk_44 Furthermore, if you only ever use gender-neutral names, they can feel artificial. Sometimes the surgeon *should* be called Chantelle!

@DavidKButlerUoA @samholloway @ajk_44 Oh sorry, I ended up writing an extension to @NclNumbas which picks random people for you github.com/numbas/numbas-…

@DavidKButlerUoA Hmm.. Seems to be US-based, since the 5 ethnicity codes include "American Indian".

@DavidKButlerUoA Sorry, I misread. It's "Indian or Native American"

@solvemymaths @roger_mansuy I'm colourblind. Which ones are red? Is that why it was rejected?

@solvemymaths @roger_mansuy ta. Will colour vision be required for the rest of the book?

bloopdance.com is my new favourite website

@Akaria35 @aperiodical 2014.

@Pecnut @mscroggs seeing the Why bird again gladdens my heart

@legolasismine @SamHartburn I won't be there this year, so you can have my spot. That's an order!

@peterrowlett Height of a house as a function of number of bricks used.

@peterrowlett Apparent brightness of a light as a function of its distance. Strength of squash as a function of amount of water added

@jjaron the pic currently in the story is of an early design, so maybe they only drew the bit people care about

@jjsanderson it's the new cycling utopia of Newcastle. We'll be ruddy Dutch by the end of the decade.

@C_J_Smith Something about this scene doesn't quite add up... is there a boy under that chair?

@mcrmathsjam I want to see what you come up with!

Just thought of a @Raspberry_Pi project to help train my dog: release a biscuit whenever someone knocks on the door

@stecks I'll have to check our Numbas pen stocks. Not sure we still have 100 left.

Truth. Like many other American things, bafflingly old-fashioned. twitter.com/DavidKButlerUo…

@jjaron it's a password you can never change. What could possibly go wrong?

@theoremoftheday to paraphrase Box, all models are wrong, and most of those are made up by psychologists

@DanielColquitt the latter

@mathhombre @brilliantorg What error did they make?

@AdamCreen That's your last chance - spot the SOLD sign!

Oh, happy π approximation day everyone!

@hnodrog Too approximate

@kyledevans Yikes! What they don't know won't hurt them right?

@kyledevans Well, I was going to register 22over7.com to go with three.onefouronefivenine.com but I forgot. So we both failed!

@BikeMath Huh wha?

@standupmaths @QMUL I've had the same password at uni/work for the past 13 years. Every now and then I think I should change it, just in case someone's seen it

@hnodrog In your head, or measured against something? The joy of that trick is occasionally getting it wrong!

@DavidKButlerUoA There's a Neighbours board game?!

The Interesting Esoterica bot tooted one of my favourite paper titles today: A Smaller Sleeping Bag For A Baby Snake
mathstodon.xyz/@esoterica/140…

A nice post by David Bailey about recent "peer-reviewed" papers which give the wrong value for π.
mathscholar.org/pi-and-the-col…

@wblut @nicoptere @ways000 @moebio @stevenstrogatz Fading the canvas a bit each frame makes nice pictures!

!!!!
The only thing that could beat this for me would be finding a Curta calculator. twitter.com/maanow/status/…

Is anyone interested in a copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for PC on 5.25" floppies? I think I'm finally ready to let it go

@victorolosaurus God no!

But you're more likely to be calling when they do have a higher than average volume of calls twitter.com/cbahlai/status…

Is the degree to which a clock runs slow, like X seconds per day, dimensionless?

Using Firefox because some IT policy has unexpectedly removed Chrome from my work PC. Quite miffed I can't use multiple profiles at once!

@ColinTheMathmo that's the kind of thing I'd want to follow a single-purpose account for

@Ingolf_He Ahh, that rings a bell. I thought I'd heard of a way of doing it!

Don't I know it! twitter.com/CIRCA_StAndrew…

Outlook summary of an email: "Hi Christian Perfect!"
Uh-oh, my old name!
Actual content:
"Hi Christian
Perfect!"
Just a coincidence 😌

99 @NclNumbas questions created by our summer students ready to use!
Time to take a break.

@NclNumbas I got 99 problems and they've each been rigorously proofread.

What about that time I had Bell's palsy?
Or, like, any of the myriad other ways your face can change
bbc.co.uk/news/av/techno…

PS not convinced they can tell identical twins apart if they're currently only 95% accurate (that's 1 in 20 incorrect)

Are they *sure* that no two people in a city of 9 million will look the same to this? The birthday paradox means they need a *big* ID space

so, given the people involved aren't stupid: what's this system really for? What error rate have they decided to accept?

I suppose one way of getting anon people to test your face recognition system is to give them a monetary incentive to point out bad matches

Perfect encapsulation of gender roles:
1) ideas v smiles
2) 'man' v 'girl'
3) girls' design more intricate
4) boys' one is cheaper!
🙅‍♂️ twitter.com/solvemymaths/s…

Delight in seeing a street cleaner with an anarchy tattoo. Split personality?

The end is just beginning to peek over the horizon...

#checkathon2017

@panlepan nice. Not sure it replaces the compass - what if you want to draw a circle whose radius isn't a whole number of cm?

@RobJLow the high-viz with council logo puts paid to that idea

@RobJLow @panlepan you have to put your pencil in a hole to draw a circle. It looks like they're every half centimetre. If only there was a high-res pic!

@RobJLow @panlepan ahh, but five rows of holes. Looks more encouraging now

@sxpmaths ooh, now I can't look at it an not want them lined up

@peterrowlett I'm going to be pedantic! Things become less true when we generalise axioms, e.g. anything following from the parallel postulate

@peterrowlett no, but "lines cross once or never" is a different statement to "lines on a Euclidean plane cross once or never", though... (1/2)

@peterrowlett ... people before non-Euclidean geometry would've been happy saying they're effectively the same

@peterrowlett right! So theorems don't always stay as big: by generalising, the part of the mathematical world they apply to gets smaller

@peterrowlett my point is that Euclid's axioms were the only game in town. I'm getting at the idea that something that always applied becomes less so

Not a day goes by that I don't internally thank @peterrowlett for asking for the 'except' operator in @NclNumbas

@peterrowlett stick that on your REF

!!!!

svahausa.com/collections/sv…

@be4zley @kevinrutherford Yes. I had half a thought that you can concoct some kind of 'derivative world' with base unit per-seconds, where it isn't dimensionless

@ColinTheMathmo I'm getting the 16:43 to Paddington. Anything later would mean I get back to Newcastle around midnight

The @aperiodical slack channel now has a bot that sets up posts for us when we have half an idea. Maybe this will get us back on track...

@ColinTheMathmo Let me tell you I got a normal ticket for 37.50!

@ColinTheMathmo (but thanks anyway!)

Such a nice graph! twitter.com/CodyPhelan/sta…

@icecolbeveridge It does, but I'm impervious to nerdsniping while making my lunch

@icecolbeveridge now I'm sitting down I can think about it. Has anyone got my new spa treatment, SINE/CURE?

@icecolbeveridge best I can do with the metric "sum of squares of each word's length" is TEMPERA/MENTALLY

@icecolbeveridge will we accept EXPECT/ORATION?

@icecolbeveridge @RealityMinus3 I'll chuck in MART/IN/GALE and be on my way

The weather was very dramatic on Tynemouth pier this morning

Forget false positive or false negative - the long-rumoured Type III error, finally spotted in the wild. twitter.com/Richards_fiona…

@hollykrieger That's not how it is everywhere?!

Moderately nice print-yourself mathsy posters, $2 each. The ones about mathematicians are my favourites mathposters.net/mathematicians

Can you help me work out what mistake the company my mum bought furniture from have made in calculating a discount? mathstodon.xyz/@christianp/17…

Done!!!
And a nice power of 2, so we can run an instant-knockout tournament to find the best question.
#checkathon2017

@sangwinc Yuck! Apart from anything else, the incredibly terse statements are very hard to work with.

@icecolbeveridge Maths error in the last paragraph: closing ) instead of }

Sad when the HR department doesn't get the difference between 'discreet' and 'discrete'.

Uni is collecting data on disabilities so it can comply with non-discrimination law: 😊

Form only lets you pick one disability: 😒

oh, it's a SAP form. Which means they've paid a huge amount of money for the form to be useless.
And it doesn't even save, anyway.

seems HR's solution is an option "two or more disabilities".
So the form might as well be a checkbox "I'm disabled in some way".

If someone's making the effort to tell you about their disability, why would you not want as much information as they're willing to give?

What can you usefully do to help, knowing that X % of your research employees have "a specific learning difficulty" (but not which one)

@JamesMoosh Quite. But this information won't help them comply, since they need to know exactly what's up so they can accommodate and adjust

@peterrowlett @icecolbeveridge huh! I was convinced I'd written "TeX error". You might be right!

@pkrautz I've seen it from a few people. Your tweet wasn't the immediate trigger, no

@pkrautz why?

I've come up with a cracking one for @wacnt: number of babies born in the UK during the minute's silence on 11/11

@notonlyahatrack @bhampton271828 you might find some more inspiration at aperiodical.com/2013/04/art-fo…

In an arty mood so I'm picking random entries from read.somethingorotherwhatever.com to illustrate.
First: read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/NonSexis…

Email from local UCU rep says that the pension fund's deficit has increased by 9,000,000,000,000. Is my professor in line for a superyacht?

@evelynjlamb @panlepan have you seen math.toronto.edu/~drorbn/Galler… ?
Click on a wallpaper group to see photos of real-world examples

@jjaron I'm amused by their outrage at the idea boys should know how it works as well

Clever paper folding *and* chocolate! Nobody even try to stop me!
visuall.net/2017/07/29/uto…

@FOTSN @standupmaths Like this?
"Up above / down below / to the left / you're too slow / move along a fifth axis / higher-dimensional salutation praxis"

Boring maths tweet: is there a comprehensive taxonomy of topics in maths up to undergrad level? The mathcentre one is very spotty

@tomas_lbl I'd like a bit more detail - that page has two layers of categories - and Khan Academy is not famously rigorous

@michaeljgrove @maanow The mathcentre one is based on that. I want it to include things like sums of series, and GCDs and LCMs

@icecolbeveridge @Dragon_Dodo make the dog a member of the parachute regiment and you're fine

@peterseibel @CompSciFact that's a corollary of "your keys are always in the last place you look"

@ColinTheMathmo @Pecnut So only a problem if the train doesn't reach capacity? Because you're taking a seat from someone who could make the more popular journey

@Pecnut HI EVERYBODY! IT'S ME, DR {FIRSTNAME}!

I'm old so I've stopped buying DVDs. Humanity's clever so storage gets cheaper. One day it'll be affordable to rip my DVDs. But not yet.

@C_J_Smith ahh, what compression ratio do you get?
My dream is to replace the (as compact as it can get) boxes of DVDs with a RasPi + big HDD

@icecolbeveridge they work for netflix, but because of Economics they don't make everything they've ripped available at once

What to do when the trisector comes.
mathstodon.xyz/@esoterica/191…
#illustratedesoterica

@drvinceknight @C_J_Smith Depends if you're the kind of person who enjoys mindless, repetitive tasks. Maybe while listening to a podcast...

@C_J_Smith @drvinceknight which means I have... 15 weeks to get this done!

@C_J_Smith @drvinceknight might be why I'm coming up with displacement activities!

this must be what my friends hear when I start talking about different kinds of infinities twitter.com/DrWhoUSA/statu…

The graph showing the evolution of languages is not a directed acyclic graph.
This picture should have lots more loops in it! twitter.com/qikipedia/stat…

Step 1: set up private GitLab for the department
Step 2: fill colleague's repo with issues
Step 3: hear him groan through the partition wall

@RobJLow kinds as in countable v uncountable, and the sizes of each

@pozorvlak exactly: it's not acyclic

@RobJLow did you see aperiodical.com/2017/06/the-cu… ? It gets more and more mind-blowing

Had to compare rounding 0.67*x, 2/3*x and 0.66*x to two decimal places. Plot shows different combinations of agreement. Interesting!

Need to try! twitter.com/lesliewattsart…

The wife has offered to paint me in the nuddy. "For balance" 😐 twitter.com/IanSimmons/sta…

@IanSimmons Based on a painting by William Blake, so I think it counts!

@jjaron They're equivalent in bee-ano arithmetic

👍👍👍 twitter.com/danielcolquitt…

@aperfect @DJIGlobal You've never bought yourself a drone! The horror!

I've got a little bit hooked on mini metro

It's cumulonumbers man! twitter.com/ZoeLGriffiths/…

I reorganised the @MathJax docs so the top hierarchy is much less cluttered. Config options easier to find now! docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/inde…

@plusmathsorg typo: "When A=D the surface area of the come"

Have just discovered via @CyclingEclipse that there's a town in Oregon called Philomath. brb, setting up a @numberphile knock-off

Already knowing about it, I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the Giant's Causeway. I wasn't - it's truly incredible. twitter.com/MarcusduSautoy…

@divbyzero @myfavethm @SongExploder I tried sth similar: get a mathmo to tell me about something they're currently thinking about, until I understand
aperiodical.com/2017/06/the-cu…

There's a fascinating conference on gerrymandering happening right now. Follow #gerrymandr and be shocked at the shape of American districts twitter.com/j_lanier/statu…

This looks like an instant classic twitter.com/MathPaper/stat…

@peterrowlett @icecolbeveridge Just went down 50%

why is the co-op trying so hard to sell me electrical goods?

@DavidKButlerUoA I think I have a solution. Are degenerate triangles not really triangles?

@panlepan @DavidKButlerUoA well, since you've spoiled it, I'll add that I reckon with non-integer lengths, the shortest stick is 30/13cm long. (minus epsilon)

@panlepan @DavidKButlerUoA yep, that'd be ε.
BTW, unicodeit.net is very good - type LaTeX, get unicode

@ajk_44 the blog Turismo Matematico has a ton of mathsy things to see in Florence: mateturismo.wordpress.com/?s=florencia

If you want to do some maths sightseeing on your Summer hols:
1) look up your destination's name in Spanish
2) go to mateturismo.wordpress.com

@jjaron that's madness! When do you listen? While working?

Clever Hans is having a little sleep.

@johndavidread @aperiodical Oh dear! I was sure I'd seen Robert Recorde, but must've been somewhere else. I can recommend the Tenby museum for its tiny Recorde exhibit

LOVE THIS twitter.com/ajk_44/status/…

@ajk_44 Children sufficiently young to play this might not be accurate enough to do the sum properly, and will get cross when incorrectly accused

@ajk_44 if the kids work out your trick, you can offer to fix it with scores 1,6,9,54,81

@ajk_44 oh! Or 1,2,5,13,34

@ajk_44 it's possible I've over-thought this codepen.io/christianp/ful…

@CardColm I'm with windows - uninstall mcafee!

Is there a word for when autocorrect changes a misspelt word to 'unintelligible', making your text... unintelligible?

@CardColm well, they're offering Windows Defender

I'm having a lovely morning listening to this twitter.com/laRadioNova/st…

@CardColm certainly better than McAfee.

I went to refurbished mcdonald's in town yesterday. It's got those whizzy ordering screens, and I noticed it offers other languages...

so of course I chose Welsh. While bits were in Welsh, there was a lot of English, and my receipt was completely English. What's the point?

Have I done a "find the link to read the article" for CUP journals before?
Try this one. Took me two passes, then some lateral thinking

That's this page: cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Once you get to the article: apparently the gazette is typeset in Word!

@Mathematical_A It's an icon, with no label, hiding next to some social sharing buttons.

@Pyfagorass ooh good, we've been meaning to catch up with it

This visualisation of a baby's sleeping patterns is giving me the fear reddit.com/r/dataisbeauti…

@DavidKButlerUoA @MathTeachScholl @joeykelly89 @nomad_penguin Can I ask one number to combine with itself?

@DavidKButlerUoA Ahh, got it