Tweets from 2019

@GreyAlien As a geordie, the thought of not having multiple Greggses within walking distance unsettles me

Some #thirdsday reading: Division By Three
arxiv.org/abs/math/06057…
"We prove without appeal to the Axiom of Choice that for any sets A and B, if there is a one-to-one correspondence between 3xA and 3xB then there is a one-to-one correspondence between A and B."

And I feel this is also in the spirit of #thirdsday: What to do When the Trisector Comes, by Underwood Dudley
web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatTo…

@ColinTheMathmo @samholloway You can set a header using a .htaccess file. See something like htaccessbook.com/add-custom-hea…
I'm not sure that'll help though. I don't think chrome has had an rss viewer for yonks

Was feeling a bit down about my endeavours, and then I see that someone has posted my Interesting Esoterica collection to @mefiblue: metafilter.com/178580/Orange-…

@Pecnut Doubletree

@mefiblue oh, and @ColinTheMathmo too on the same day: metafilter.com/178577/it-help…. MeFi was having a maths day, I suppose

@peterrowlett I have had the same password for 14 years. I'm so glad newcastle's IT have got their heads screwed on

@stecks @Kit_Yates_Maths @VANS_66 @SparksMaths @MathsatBath @robeastaway @MathsWorldUK @MathsJam @MoMath1 @nrichmaths @plusmathsorg They used to have a warehouse under the redheugh bridge in Newcastle. Can't remember their name though!

This story is currently at the top of BBC News, next to the serious issues of the day: bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-…
I guess it's up there because the clickbaity headline got it lots of clicks.
Demonstrates really poor maths literacy among the editors.

I don't want to pooh-pooh that boy: he's quick at doing sums, which is a fun skill to have.
But the reporter picks big numbers with lots of zeros on the end. Tonnes of 10 year olds would be able to do the sums shown.

So the video demonstrates the reporter's poor number sense, and then who knows how many layers of editors who either didn't know or didn't care whether there was anything worthwhile in the report at all. Would they run a "boy finds rare animal" video showing a kid with a rabbit?

Or gobsmacked reaction shots as a child recites "she sells seashells by the seashore"?

The kid can probably do lots more (I hope so!)
The reporter couldn't ask the right questions.

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy
He had to live with the odium
Of having discovered sodium

#clerihew twitter.com/royalsociety/s…

@peterrowlett @poveryant read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/CajoriNo…

@jjaron could Germany be low because it's more common for a parent to stay at home, and that hasn't been accounted for?

@jjaron If one parent stays at home and doesn't get paid, net income is lower, but childcare costs are zero, so childcare as a % of net income is zero.

Holy prime producing patterns, batman!
Simon Plouffe has found a formula which produces 50 prime numbers in a row:

a(0) = 10^500 + 961
a(n+1) = a(n)^(101/100)

⌊aₙ⌋ is a prime number for the first 50 n!

Paper on the arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/1901.01849

Just automatically tested all ~1500 questions in our private @NclNumbas editor against the new version. It works!
(Well, I found several bugs and fixed them and *now* it works)

@profRoys @KateHoeyMP @UKLabour and I don't expect those protections to last long once we're out and there's nobody left to hold the tories back

The Organum Mathematicum is a fabulous-looking thing: vps280516.ovh.net/divulgamat15/i…
A box of sticks which form tables to help with mathematical calculations, sort of like Napier rods, but for artillery and music?!
Of course this oddity is a product of Athanasius Kircher!

@geoviews @OrdnanceSurvey They say they look for the longest distance between opposing vertices. That's not necessarily the longest straight line in the polygon, if it's non-convex. If there are enough vertices, this won't matter too much, though.
Taking elevation change into account would be interesting!

@peterrowlett @icecolbeveridge @WrongButUseful @reflectivemaths this is giving me flashbacks to when I used to send in a million links to math/maths every week

@Pecnut That's quite a thing, to have a single, massive SCOTLAND and all those English regions

@icecolbeveridge is the paper you did online somewhere?

Bad Bayesianism:

1) My daughter is wonderful beyond my expectations
2) When bad things happen to people, people on the news say how remarkably good they were
3) In my experience, not all of humanity is particularly good

Therefore, 4) something bad will to happen to my daughter

Testing some @NclNumbas homeworks on ODEs.
Never mind "I can't do calculus... yet", my current frame of mind is "I can't do calculus... still".

Running down to the printers to get this t-shirt made

@sxpmaths Coefficient of friction between the tyres and the ground isn't given, and you'd expect it to be much less than the friction on the skip, so can infer it's negligible. They should definitely have said that explicitly, though.

@sxpmaths it's like those geometry puzzles where an important length isn't given, so you can sometimes find an answer by inferring it's independent of the solution and setting it to 1

@sxpmaths @themathdiva but famously, wheels mitigate friction

@evelynjlamb @Thalesdisciple Thanks! 'Equal' is one.

@ionicasmeets As someone responsible for an academic software project, I can say that this kind of mistake is alive and well.

@Andrew_Taylor More achievable: one that enforces the rule 'I before E except after C'

Looky what just arrived. Thanks, @glitch!

Time for the brexit vote. I've got my cake and I'm eating it!

@matheknitician @SparksMaths @IllusiveSteve Oooh!

@matheknitician @SparksMaths @IllusiveSteve I'd really like to use that as a spray paint stencil

So glad I don't get DLA any more. What's the master plan here? twitter.com/DrFrancesRyan/…

@Andrew_Taylor interesting choice of faces on the front cover

@reflectivemaths @honeypisquared @icecolbeveridge It's good! Best with 4 players

@reflectivemaths @honeypisquared @icecolbeveridge It gets unmanageable after 6

What exchange rate would cause this to be inaccurate? twitter.com/john_overholt/…

@rooneyvision it looks like the city is sliding gently into the sea

@aperfect @Fotospeed Get the dithered gif look

@mathyadriana Pronounced 'euro d'?

@COOLIO_FEAT_LV Cool story

@myfavethm Something to do with the crocodile paradox: read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/Gerogior…

@Mathgarden Were you playing isthisprime.com/game/?

I've just learned about Grete Hermann, a German mathematician and philosopher, and student of Emmy Noether. She was an anti-fascist, and provided a sort-of constructive solution to Hilbert's Nullstellensatz.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grete_Her…

@Mathgarden Cool! Was it new to you?

@Sabetta_ @jeremy_fielding Do either of you know what constraints there are on what shapes can be made into gears?

Hey @MoMath1 do you reckon your next MathHappening could be a demonstration of Zeckendorf's theorem in Union Square, outside Zeckendorf Towers?

@Neuro_Skeptic what's the link between ASD and skull deformity?

@morethanadodo @gsciencelady A while ago I asked you where you got this factoid and you didn't answer - twitter.com/christianp/sta…
Do you know?

@benorlin I call him Croissanthony

@pwr2dppl BRB, printing "all mathematical progress has measure zero" on a load of t-shirts

@pwr2dppl either something deep about the foundations of maths, or BAHFest

The Molly and Mack songs are really catchy

@kyledevans Are those the Adam Buxton ones? I'm saving them up for when tiny L-P gets bored of Mr Tumble and Yakka Dee

@pwr2dppl If you haven't already, Google 'goat tower'

@sangwinc tiny L-P is getting started early

Does it bother anyone else that the numbers on the shapes don't correspond to their orders of rotation?

@robeastaway @rfkharris @SparksMaths Oh no! I bought his album "Paris Jazz Piano" on a whim in fnac and it's one of my absolute faves.

@elinoroberts That maths behind finding layouts that work is surprisingly complicated: lamington.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/lay…

@Mathematical_A @stevejmcc There's always time to have another think. Not much effort to be clearer

@Mathematical_A @stevejmcc Yes, please do that

@jjaron Weezer are available for weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, and retirement parties

@Elyl_V @SamsungHelpUK @Android @colourblindorg I guess Samsung, because I have it turned on on my Nokia running Android Pie, and I don't have a notification

@BexhillMathsjam you might get away with using Octave, the open source Matlab clone gnu.org/software/octav…

@brittneybean How long until he outdoes Philip Green and runs away with the accumulated pension pots of every high street chain?

My co-milkshake brings the yard to all the boys

Just published asciimath2tex to npm, because someone asked me to: npmjs.com/package/asciim…

@DavidB52s @robeastaway the only other two letters this is possible for are B and S. Both of those are much more popular than L. Bury is the only B team in league two, and Southampton is the only S team in the premiership.

@icecolbeveridge I know why! 😁
Hint: lazy coders

@icecolbeveridge even better, this is what desktop Twitter shows me

@stecks @davidallengreen A likely story

The new web Outlook design has separate buttons for Reply and Reply-All.
This alone is worth switching for.

@matheknitician you nerdsniped me and I programmed this: codepen.io/christianp/ful…

He brings shame on the Perfect name twitter.com/john_overholt/…

@Samuel_Hansen Fancy writing a quick @aperiodical post with that info?

@C_J_Smith @JeremyJHardy There's the title of your parenting memoirs, righ there

I made an RPN calculator with some nifty features using @glitch. It's at nice-calculator.glitch.me twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

@anildash Thanks!

@anildash @glitch So I should add the ability to embed a calculation in the URL, right?

@anildash @glitch done!
nice-calculator.glitch.me/#15,$%F0%9F%A6…

@firasd @anildash @glitch ahh, what characters will email clients object to? The commas?

@firasd @anildash @glitch because I like being able to see what the calculation is in the URL, which base64 encoding would ruin

@ch_nira @aperiodical Hence our first use of the "not that one the American one" tag in our post!

@jjaron Absolutely the same

@msmirandasawyer @BarryJenkins I enjoyed it a lot!

@mathsjem what's special about a November sitting? Is it a resit?

I've written a @NclNumbas question which marks a formula given by the student, then checks that they can apply it.
Lots of custom marking stuff to make sure their formula is equivalent to the expected one, and the number they give satisfies their formula
numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/question/41804…

@CmonMattTHINK @NclNumbas guess who forgot to use the randomised variable

Got my @ucu ballot. There's an election with two candidates, which is being conducted by single transferable vote. 🤔

tfw you're taking a big swig of a drink and have to abort because you're approaching a door frame. #TallPeopleProblems

@timstirrup I have to stoop a little bit to go fit under most door frames. When taking a swig, you straighten your back, which means I'd have to bend my legs instead. Looks like the ministry of silly walks!

@icecolbeveridge STEP!!!!!

I've just paid for the full version of @devilscalc. It's one of those 'work out what the calculator is doing' games, but it's really good! The calculator is truly _cursed_. I was a bit optimistic thinking I'd do it on the metro though. My brain hurts!

@jjsanderson Oh dear! Wishing you a speedy recovery

I'm only on level 14 and there are like 50 more 😭

@mathsjem @Samuel_Hansen it was nice to hear you speaking so positively about #BigMathOff on Relatively Prime!

@MBarany BEEP BOOP I LIKE DATABASES

@ben_nuttall I think that list is really just telling you how big those things normally are

@kyledevans Just wait until they start talking about group actions

@blatherwick_sam Geogebra!

It's always good when you put a sequence in the OEIS and the first hit begins "An obvious ..."
oeis.org/A029578

JS RegExp is getting lookbehind and named capture groups!! 🤩 twitter.com/JavaScriptDail…

@icecolbeveridge Best one yet

@ajk_44 @icecolbeveridge Finite group do do do do do do!
Quotient group do do do do do do!

The little L-P is a natural mathematician.
We were looking for a kitchen utensil she'd stolen. She went to look under her favourite chair. It wasn't there!
When we did find it, she immediately ran and put it under the chair: now it's a problem we know how to solve! 🤓

@C_J_Smith I feel she already has an intuitive, if not rigorous, understanding of that fact

@jamesgrime @jamestanton @maanow Ooh, this is that thing you were talking about! Do you (or they) have it in you to do a bit for the aperiodical about it?

Can I reverse engineer how long I should expect my new freezer to last beyond the standard warranty by using the cost of the extended warranty and a guess at the shop's markup?

@miclugo We had that problem for a long time. After a while it becomes clearer and then you can post-date the first word, with the knowledge that it really did mean what it sounded like

@ajk_44 I'm sure I can find the real expected lifespan somewhere (excuse me, I mean 'elicit ground truth' or some such rot)

Does anyone else have the same problem I just had with my smart meter thingamajig?
Clue: there's nothing wrong with the vertical scale

.@My_Metro I'm having trouble with the smart bike lockers. I'm colourblind, so can't tell between red, green and amber lights. (cc @colourblindorg)
The info page says bikes at most 1720mm fit - which dimension is that? Surely all of width, height and length are constrained

@My_Metro @colourblindorg Just left Monkseaton. Chained my bike to the rack

@My_Metro @colourblindorg ... so, what are the maximum dimensions? It looked like my bike was too tall and the handlebars too wide, but 1720mm must be the length

@My_Metro @colourblindorg that doesn't contain any information about the maximum dimensions that will fit. If you can't answer the question, that's OK.

Now a moot point: it's been stolen. twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@tarrou I locked it on a rack like I normally do, so asking about the smart lockers this morning was just exceptionally poor timing

@ben_nuttall @github Yeah, this has annoyed me for ages.

Breakfast is going really well

@peterrowlett @mark_datko @MathsJam intriguingly, it claims there are 106. It must be including ones on hiatus

@HilariousCow hyperbolic space! I know of some Japanese people doing a similar radial thing for writing maths

That's 5×60×60 = 18,000 pizzas, around one pizza for every 3,500 people in the UK. Is that a lot? Not very many? Feels the right order of magnitude for what I'd expect. twitter.com/qikipedia/stat…

@wtgowers @johncarlosbaez @divbyzero that's a statement I definitely want to put to the test!

@johncarlosbaez @wtgowers @divbyzero There's got to be some good psychology in quickly making up random-looking sequences. I wonder if any digit is more likely to slip past unnoticed, being repeated more often than it should

@ColinTheMathmo @OddsAndEvenings This is one of those "I have a fact that I want to show you" puzzles. Not my favourite type.

@Andrew_Taylor *extremely unsure face*

Lots of colour-based sequences on only connect tonight. I've got even less of a chance than normal!

@charmingnumbers @reflectivemaths @icecolbeveridge It doesn't use LaTeX directly, but a lot of its layout rules are derived from TeX

@reflectivemaths @Pecnut @icecolbeveridge That kind of thing is fairly straightforward in latex. Maths mode in general is fairly reasonable, with a good reference for the commands to produce different symbols. It's whole-page layouts that are a nightmare.

@icecolbeveridge @ajk_44 @RobJLow @reflectivemaths @Pecnut Less obliquely: there are some cool new tools that fairly easily take LaTeX and produce both printable PDFs and web pages. Most of them involve pandoc. I was just composing a reply saying we should chat about that, because it's something nrich should do

@reflectivemaths @peterrowlett @njj4 @icecolbeveridge Yeah, you can use \bigger and \smaller and other similarly-named macros to change the size fromvthe default. But like Peter said, you don't really want to make the superscript much smaller

Further evidence the tiny L-P is a mathematician, at bathtime last night:

* holding a bottle full of water *
"Can you put some water in the jug, please?"
* stands bottle upright in jug, spilling none *

Must learn to speak more precisely __to my 1 year old__

@oliver_daddow @colourblindorg @Mariesthename which kind? I have protanomaly and they're easy to distinguish

@icecolbeveridge wow, wordpress did *not* enjoy the TeX in that title!

@Bullsy_Ironside @kyledevans I came here to say that

Witness my very professional technique for transferring PLA filament onto a spindle that fits the 3d printer.

@nomad_penguin For exams in particular, there were two presentations at @EAMSConf:
eams.ncl.ac.uk/archive/2016/s… by Jennifer Moody
And eams.ncl.ac.uk/archive/2016/s… by Natasa Brouwer-Zupancic

@nomad_penguin @EAMSConf We've run both low and high stakes exams at Newcastle successfully for a few years using @NclNumbas. I can describe what we do if you like, but we haven't got anything published about it yet.

@nomad_penguin @EAMSConf @NclNumbas There's a paper by the eminent @sangwinc which looks at secondary level maths exams, and what kinds of questions can be automatically marked: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@nomad_penguin @EAMSConf @NclNumbas Can you email christian.perfect@ncl.ac.uk? Not sure I have it in me to do it all in tweets!

@C_J_Smith @peterrowlett I would recommend @glitch!

YES. t.co/91gUw4dcEg

@DavidKButlerUoA I would dispute that "very hot" begins between 37 and 39C

@mathforge @aperiodical root@aperiodical.com, thanks!

Playing around with interconnecting #3dprinted Herschel enneahedra

@ThisIsBullet51 I don't know for sure, but I'd be extremely surprised if it did

do I know anyone who's read "The Square Root of Summer" by Harriet Reuter Hapgood?

@SamHartburn I've left a teeny bit too much wiggle room, so they go together nicely and hold fairly well, but slip off a bit too easily when manipulating it

@soupie66 do I know them?

Has anyone got something mathematical they'd like to say on International Women's Day, on the @aperiodical?

Just started a 3d print that claims it'll be finished in 9 minutes. Now on the lookout for 3d printers travelling at relativistic speeds. It's the only plausible explanation.

Why doesn't every calculator have a "divide by smallest factor" button?
#NumberTheoryProblems

@samholloway @LNER Is that the minimal observable unit of chilli?

If you had to pick a symbol for the operation "divide by smallest factor", what would it be? twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@jjaron Gosh that's brilliant, but also terrible UX

Good morning! 🤖

@Simon_Gregg Affirmative

@panlepan Because it looks like a down arrow on top of a vinculum?

@FOTSN @BBCRadio4 Where can I put all my tupperware?

just did `git reset --hard` on a directory I'd spent weeks on without committing!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

oh phew, the `git diff` I did before means I can make a patch and get it back 😅

@CloudoidLtd Nope

A fab page full of stats and good graphics about growing up twitter.com/MikeEllicock/s…

@sangwinc Not at all, except for when I'm proofreading number theory exercises!

@RealityMinus3 Thanks, I'm aware, but currently at the bottom of a pile of relatives. Will try to fix tonight

One of the problems with e-learning is that this never happens to me. twitter.com/Original_Vaugh…

Right. If I put "all mathematical progress has measure zero" on a t-shirt, what pedantic, smart-alec retorts are you all going to come up with?

Noted!
Vitali sets are unmeasurable, so this is similar to the "what if interesting numbers don't admit a well-ordering?" response to the classic joke. twitter.com/hartkp/status/…

@henryseg @0themdubs @roice713 nice NSF acknowledgement at the end

@matthematician #ThatsTheJoke, I think?

@CardColm I've got a copy of that in my office!

@C_J_Smith

@C_J_Smith I've just come downstairs after a bathtime that was going swimmingly until she banged her head on the tap. Now she's crying herself to sleep

MCDONALDS DOES TWO COLOURS OF SAUCE?!?! 🤯 twitter.com/TheMrBirch/sta…

Somebody has either sprinkled corn flakes into this toilet bowl or needs to see a doctor ASAP

@CounterOfSheep is this requirement new? It's ridiculous!

Who writes for statisticsviews.com? You'd expect Wiley and Sons to apply some of their famous added value and fix things like unfinished sentences, which are abundant in this piece. twitter.com/MEIMaths/statu…

@B_u_r_t_o_n yeah, another point against it. Stick www in front of it

@CounterOfSheep I wonder how I was supposed to hear about it in order to comply. I can't imagine it being upheld if ever challenged.

this has completely nerdsniped me. The statisticsviews article cites an article in SE London local paper "News Shopper" for the majority of its factoids. That article, of course, gives no references.

But we can do carbon-dating on the milk in swimming pools factoid! It says 2 pancakes per person, or 117 million pancakes. So the population of the UK was 117/2 = 58.5 million. That was around the turn of the Millennium (the population stat would be a year or two old when used)

Or, the author of the factoid had a really really out of date reference book. I can't find any hits for "117 million pancakes" before 2014, so that's probably the right explanation.

And lo, as surely as the sun rises in the east, I've found the source of the stat: an infographic released by Asda. visual.ly/community/info…

Actually, there are two figures at play: '117 million pancakes' is oddly precise, but '2 pancakes each' could be anything between 1.5 and 2.5!
Dividing 117 million by the population of the UK in 2014, 64 million, gives 1.8 each, which does indeed round to 2

So we're already 10% off. If you're filling swimming pools with milk, that could lead to an unfortunate spillage.

Now, swimming pools. An Olympic pool is about 2.5 million litres big, according to google. 93 swimming pools makes 232.5 million litres. That's more than a litre per pancake!

The recipe I use (Delia Smith's, obv.) asks for 200ml milk per batch, to make about a dozen pancakes. That's 1.95 million litres for the UK, or 78% of a single Olympic swimming pool.

So where did 93 Olympic swimming pools come from? It's a factor of about 100 off. Centimetres instead of metres on one dimension? Misinterpreted a percentage as a real number?

The figure for the amount of flour is easier to approximately check: 117 million is almost 10 times bigger than 13 million, so that'd be about 100g of flour per pancake.
I love pancakes more than anyone else I know, and I have never eaten a pancake that big.

If you're sharing this article with students as a source of fun real-world stats and your prompt isn't "do these stats make the slightest bit of sense?", please reconsider.

@robotmaths What does that mean?

I love an integerology/lexicography crossover twitter.com/HaggardHawks/s…

@peterrowlett Turns out there's an undocumented simplifier 'exptrigsimp': docs.sympy.org/1.0/_modules/s…

@alexbellos @BBCRadio4 @BBCr4today I agree, and @robeastaway has written some criticism on his blog: robeastaway.com/blog/radio-puz…

Being dyspraxic is loads of fun and definitely doesn't result in a permanent exhibition of bruises

Following the example of the oesophagoose, here's another public health campaign with challenging orthography: "Take Ovar", about ovarian cancer.
Good spelling could save your life!

(yes, 'oesophagoose' is a thing you're supposed to see on a bus and remember long enough to put into Google, which autocorrects to 'esophagus', leaving you no closer to oesophagoose.org)

Current status: Making these cups and saucers accessible

Is there decent offline speech to text software for the @Raspberry_Pi yet? I have a grammar that I recognise, but it can't be compiled to a list of commands.
Needing wifi to talk to google is quite limiting.
(@ben_nuttall, do you know?)

@evelynjlamb and now they're going to label your pint of blood 'Sophie Germain'

@ben_nuttall @Raspberry_Pi @mycroft_ai @RachelRayns Thanks, I don't think mycroft existed last time I worked on this project. I'll have a look.

@ben_nuttall @Raspberry_Pi @mycroft_ai @RachelRayns From the docs it looks like mycroft needs to be connected to the internet too. That's the bit I want to avoid

I would 100% buy this if the quality of threadless t-shirts hadn't gone to the dogs twitter.com/nathanwpyle/st…

@elinoroberts I'm not looking forward to costume days. The thought of it would've given tiny me the horrors!

@helenarney whoah there overachiever, give the rest of us time to catch up!

The most interesting part of this story for me is that the Totnes pound appears to have a £21 note. What are the ramifications of that?
I bet @Pecnut has done the maths.
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…

The struggle is real t.co/BiK3BD38zZ

@MBarany Never mind the Fields medal and Abel prize, there should be awards for mathematicians with particularly good board writing.

😮 twitter.com/wumi0212/statu…

@Kit_Yates_Maths @icecolbeveridge @benjamindickman @benorlin @benjamin_leis Levenshtein distance 3

I made some #math t-shirts!
Would it be worth me putting them up for sale on a print-on-demand site?

@Fran997331 @aperiodical Thanks!

In statistical inference, the most common error is Type III: forgetting which way round Types I and II go.

@sxpmaths @JimPropp Yep, that's one of the ones I've forgotten. The one in the replies about pregnancy, too.

Today on @BBC6Music, Amy Lamé's show is about numbers and statistics!
bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…

Imagining the meeting where it was decided that square metres are probably beyond the cbeebies audience twitter.com/CBeebiesHQ/sta…

I'm making a bold foray into entrepreneurialism with these t-shirt designs, sold for pretty much the lowest margin redbubble would allow. twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

@PaulsPrattle @drvinceknight you asked, so I obliged!

@Gelada @numberphile well, I'm still trying to find my towel

@mathforge @aperiodical @SamHartburn Checks out!

😍
brickbending.com

@mathforge @aperiodical @SamHartburn Thingiverse has files you can put in your own printer. Shapeways has printers and will send you what they produce.

Please write your addendum as a comment on the post!

Theresa May's government resembles one of those genetic algorithms that was supposed to learn to play Mario but instead learned that never leaving the pause screen means it never loses

COOL WEB PEOPLE: how easily could I set up a livestream of a full screen web page, to run unattended for 24 hours?

@GhostMutt Thanks!

Next question: Twitch or YouTube? Which is least likely to get brigaded by pimply fascists?

Yesterday there was one. Today there are two. #LecternMutiny

Sorry, forgot to add a description to that photo. It's two lecterns in a corridor.

@devilscalc twitch's interface scares and confuses me.

Check out my pro streaming setup.

Current source of frustration:
1 -0.9 - 0.1 = -2.7755575615628914e-17

#javascript

@jjaron Doublenorwayplusungood

My income from t-shirt sales has just passed £π!
I'll try to remember you all whenever I use my gold-plated protractor and set square.
redbubble.com/people/christi…

All my tests pass. Going for a long walk to think about the choices I've made in life.

@wtgowers If you've got a better idea, her door is always clopen

Coming up to 300,000 digits now! youtu.be/wDW3nF9tX3c

@jack_davis_sfu it's the speed at which new digits appear

@GhostMutt Yeah, thanks for the tip

An automatic portmanteu and rhyme finder! punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator
@icecolbeveridge I bet you'll love this

@MathematicsUCL @chalkdustmag Emilie du Charolais

😍😍
princess-awesome.com/collections/gi…

I put in 'britain' and 'leave' and it came up with 'expelgium'.
If we were following policies based on compelling portmanteaux, I'd be fully behind that one!

@mathforge @aperiodical @SamHartburn It is?!

@BraneRunner @peterrowlett @aperiodical @FlintyMcQwerty To get the value of the Nth base 10 digit from the base 16 digits, you need to know all of the first ~N*10/16, not just the last one or two.

@peterrowlett @BraneRunner @aperiodical @FlintyMcQwerty They'll have verified the base 16 digits, probably, and then converted to base 10

@blatherwick_sam If I was feeling like a smart-alec, I'd just say "symmetry".
Pressed for more details, I'd say that the polygons GBAE and HACF are the same, and GB and HA are perpendicular.

@Plattsc Story checks out. I've only been out with you once, and you said "let's go somewhere else" a couple of times.

@blatherwick_sam symmetry because you're placing a point at the same position on each of the four sides of the square

@davidallengreen a stream of old men walks past my house to buy the Mail from the corner shop each morning

Francophone academics: how do you open emails to other academics?
In English, I typically go with "Hi <name>,"
What's the normal level of formality in France?

@jiyameng very nice! Do the sections correspond to fillings?

Hmm. Not prime.

@divbyzero should the last number be 102, not 120?

@robinhouston @apgox Conway wrote a standalone paper about this with O.G. Cassani, and called it 'Neumbering' - they credit John von Neumann for coming up with it.
link.springer.com/article/10.100…

@jjsanderson Not at all! Thank you for the advice. Sorry to hear your throat is still bad

@tombutton I played my daughter Gangnam Style this morning, but I think I got away with it

Theresa May
Wanted to stay
But all the other Tories
Were sick of her stories
#clerihew

@solvemymaths @Mathematical_A There's an absolutely enormous amount of info on this sequence in the OEIS: oeis.org/A000081
It pops up in all sorts of places!

@statto @chrislintott I believe that's the aim of @kielder_obs. I don't know enough about astronomy to know how big their telescopes are, but they've got some lovely ones

@icecolbeveridge Not threadless. The ones I recently ordered from redbubble were alright - go for the heavy cotton style, not standard.

@peterrowlett That makes sense: I had much more success explaining the teacups Latin square puzzle as "each row includes every colour" instead of "no colour appears more than once".

@statto @kielder_obs @chrislintott I highly recommend it

Code examples in the @NclNumbas documentation are now automatically added to the unit tests to confirm they produce the results the documentation claims they do: 👍

Swotting up before the indicative votes

@icecolbeveridge Hmm. Is there a way of doing it that isn't just wrapping up "prove the contrapositive" in a contradiction?
Assume n^2 even and n odd, say n=2m+1. Then n^2 = 4m^2 + 4m + 1, odd, so contradiction.

@icecolbeveridge oh, whoops

@icecolbeveridge so, we get to talk about implicit domains!
Is it fair to assume the convention that n is always an integer is being followed, or do they need to explicitly say it?

I'm really getting into @devilscalc now. The binary operation levels feel a lot more tractable than the unary ones.

Looks like it's approval voting (vote for as many options as you like; option with most votes wins)
Some parliamentary procedure geeks are having all their Christmases at once! twitter.com/HugoGye/status…

What fresh hell is this?
(excuse the pun?) twitter.com/Stephenmevans1…

@evelynjlamb @myfavethm Newton?

@jeremyjkun This chimes with me. I've recently started working on storytelling as a skill, both for my own benefit and for maths work.

This has been going on as long as Brexit, and (until Brexit moved) had the same completion date. The steady, competent progress and on-time delivery have kept me sane. twitter.com/paulappleby01/…

This feels appropriate for today: "Alternative Math"
youtube.com/watch?v=Zh3Yz3…

Hah, @glitch has come up with a random name that is extremely relevant to my project

@northumbriana I've always thought Thirsk should be north of the border

@solvemymaths if the content is half as good as the title, I believe you

I decided to try livestreaming coding a maths thing. I failed in several ways:
1) didn't tell anyone I was doing it
2) didn't check I'd switched video output to my screen
3) crashed my PC
Nevertheless, I made a nice hyperbolic thing on @glitch: witty-kick.glitch.me

@glitch oh!
4) I didn't set it to capture any sound

@glitch I'm on my own in the office today, and I can probably spin this as both professional development and good outreach, so who's up for watching me do some more maths coding after lunch?

@euros @glitch nope, plain old JavaScript

Here's a challenge: draw the net of a cube, and label the faces. Then draw another net, and label the faces as if you've turned the cube 90 degrees

@peterrowlett I feel like we need to start collecting his sayings into a book

Right, I've got a couple of hours while all the other L-Ps are out of the house, who's up for a bit of streaming maths coding and potentially some baking too?

Absolutely no promises that this'll be worth watching or even work, but here's a link to watch me try to code up some hyperbolic tilings: youtube.com/c/ChristianPer… twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@PaulsPrattle I got as far as the circle inversion not working

Our server admin has set a global vim config with shiftwidth=8 and tabstop=2.
I'm more confused than anything else.

@nomad_penguin @nhoskee @park_star @carloliwitter They're MathJams in the US.

@robinhouston Seems to!

@icecolbeveridge CON starts slightly lower than UKIP

@BarbaraFantechi @DrJessBoland @tigerinstemm @j_bertolotti @daisyshearer I'd put the things Jess mentioned in the same category as providing drinks during breaks. Not everyone will need them, but they could be a standard part of the organisation when you run an event

@ShriramKMurthi Is this just a problem with the phrasing of the message, or would the checker need to do more work to give a more accurate message?

@semillerimages At least one of the many, many cases in my implementation of the algorithm has a typo. I've got a pile of reports of numbers that don't work, that I need to sit down and resolve one day.

I'm really glad we did this interview. Follow @DrJessBoland for videos of mathematical signs!
And if you have a sign for 'topology', please show me! twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

@jjaron I'm not interested until it can slide the other way to reveal some largely useless "media" buttons. Nokia N95 for life!

Striking a balance between how much time you want to spend on a short email to a colleague and how well you want to grammar

An advert on French radio for an Italian pasta sauce, with a slogan in English spoken with a French accent.
🤨

That is a top notch shop pun. If only @DaveGorman was still doing Pun Street! twitter.com/roger_mansuy/s…

@Kit_Yates_Maths @FryRsquared @standupmaths SevenYatesNine

@SLSingh I'd be surprised if not - it's something we (at my uni at least) have been expecting for a few years, and experienced this year

@kyledevans @SLSingh It's what you said: the new maths GCSE

@SLSingh Mainly the new maths GCSE (and did that cohort do the new A level?), as far as I know. At Newcastle we weren't as badly hit as we feared, which our recruitment people take credit for

@SLSingh I half remember about there just being fewer 18 year olds this year, too. Engineering was very down on last year, again not unexpectedly

@paulscoombes @SLSingh I am not a recruitment officer, so I don't want to say anything authoritative. All I know for sure is we were expecting the drop

Really enjoying the latest episode of @MathsObjects, all about Pythagoras aperiodical.com/2019/04/mathem…

@BBC6Music @FryRsquared Two Dots, by Lusine

@miclugo That definitely happens! There's a sizeable contingent of people who commute to London from France, too

I'm a big fan of this sequence. twitter.com/numberphile/st…

@mathsjem "Oh, dreadfully sorry, we're not Jacobins, we're talking about *Jacobians*! "

*two hundred seditious sorts shuffle out of the room*

@roger_mansuy @Polytechnique Est-ce que vous connaissez l'origine ou la signification de la diagramme sur l'affiche?

I've just booked my place for #TMiP2019!
talkingmathsinpublic.uk

I'm finally getting my head round blender. I've just made this teeny tiny #3dprinted house

Welp, looks like a couple of hours of using Blender has killed my middle mouse button!

@COOLIO_FEAT_LV well done, you've spotted the long con.

@robeastaway Hmm, I'm trying to articulate what's surprising about this. Is it that at each iteration sqrt(n) is a suffix of n?

@robeastaway How do you feel about blowing out any of the candles, not just the leftmost few? The candle numbers in that case are then oeis.org/A046829, which currently doesn't have a name or much of anything written about it

@standupmaths @robeastaway If your calculator has a 9th root button and you are the big bad wolf, 999999 is pretty good

@C_J_Smith I considered shorts, but I reckon I can get another day out of these jeans. #soz

Well, now I've got yet another project twitter.com/Ian_Willey/sta…

Did it! About as irregular a dodecahedron as you can imagine, but I'll love it anyway

@dmswart In GIMP?! Bravo!

@dmswart I'd be interested in that. The picture above looks like it'd be far easier in something like inkscape

@stecks It would make a good t-shirt

The #PuzzleForToday is rubbish, for a variety of reasons. Yesterday's was particularly egregious - more a "guess what I'm thinking" riddle.
What would a positive version of the segment look like?
My starting point: 30 seconds of maths that you can think about for up to 10 minutes

Puzzles are fun, but unless you do lots of them, the vast majority of the time you'll bounce straight off them.
It's too easy, as seen in the Puzzle for Today, to dress up a fun maths fact as a puzzle, when just saying the fact would be just as satisfying.

However, puzzles give you a way of taking a family of problems that is completely understood in the abstract, and picking particular instances that still take some brainpower to solve. For example, I can write a general algorithm to solve sudokus, but I still enjoy them

If you just want to share a maths fact, it's very hard to boil it down to 30 seconds in a way that both gets the point across and motivates it

@blatherwick_sam Something like:
Suppose x=a^m and y=a^n.
Then xy=a^(m+n) .
And log xy = m+n = log x + log y.
Whether that's a "proof" in that it says something you didn't already know is debatable.

@dwendl1 @hollykrieger There's a dedicated community of people doing exactly that on project Gutenberg: gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathemati…

@kyledevans @FOTSN And the person they cast to play the main character never looks how you imagined

This thread has lots of ideas for fun maths things t.co/GorAeLTVKo

I'm sure other people just hop on trains without a care in the world

@drvinceknight I struggled to balance PhD thinking time with the work that was paying for it, realised it'd be the same forever, so gave up on research.

@peterrowlett @stecks @MathsObjects #teamindifference

@icecolbeveridge @peterrowlett @stecks @MathsObjects Yeah, this is one of the few things I will strongly disagree about

Not where I would put the line break

one of my colleagues had his first and surname switched, so just be glad it didn't say "Perfect Christian", because I know myself and I know I'd never take that badge off twitter.com/stecks/status/…

@thomas_bland I feel like we need to codiscover a new colour so we can call it Perfect-Bland

@JDHamkins @pliny_the_ill If you play on an N by N board, the first token dropped in never reaches the bottom. Is it sufficient that the tokens are dropped in sequence, without waiting for them to stop moving?

Why is everything in Edinburgh open 10 til 6? I was hoping to do some shopwandering before or after this conference

@jamestanton @panlepan Could you do that again with colours that I can distinguish, please? Varying lightness or using a pattern in addition to colour would be ideal

@panlepan @jamestanton Thanks! Here's a more accessible version

@Pecnut @mscroggs Oh god, not this again

The Mastodon instance that @ColinTheMathmo and I run, mathstodon.xyz, had 134 active users in the last week, all talking about #math!
And the wider fediverse is continuing to grow. If you haven't already, have a look!

@RobJLow @divbyzero yes, that is much easier to keep track of

Just remembered I've been sent a copy of "99 variations on a proof" by Philip Ording, to review.
It's brilliant, you should buy it if you've ever written, read, or thought about a proof.
press.princeton.edu/titles/13308.h…

It's inventive, it's witty, and by god it's erudite. Every proof contains something new and interesting even to me, a jaded maths hipster.

@solvemymaths if my bio doesn't already scream "jaded maths hipster" then I can't help you

@CDAXY @ColinTheMathmo I think the introduction to this book mentions that one.

@jgrahamc Bad transcription or a real life eggcorn?

@evelynjlamb Other mathematical foods: doughnuts, cookies, cake, carrots, banana trees, eggs read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/collection/food

@porridgebrain @DrLucyRogers I set a specific time when I'm going to switch to the other thing.

@IamHappyHiker @UnrealMcKay @colourblindorg @BBCBreakfast R A G would work perfectly. Don't bother messing with the colours - an extra way of differentiating in addition to colour is always better

@sangwinc Jealous!

Have just realised that talking about going 'to space' is the real life equivalent of that joke about the mathematician drawing a tiny circle round himself and declaring he's on the outside

Email about an imposter syndrome workshop. Recipients hidden.

... am I the only person they sent it to?

@stecks 😭

aaaaand all my tests pass again. 😅

@DavidKButlerUoA @Desmos I always have time to talk about rounding methods! There are loads! Banker's rounding is my hate crush. Wikipedia has this surprisingly interactive diagram: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…

@estwebber

My last year's work! Glad to get this out - some proper hard thinking went into it twitter.com/NclNumbas/stat…

@profRoys @LibDems @ForChange_Now @TheGreenParty Mrs L-P accused me of being a secret tory today after both theirs and the brexit party's leaflets arrived, addressed to me. Started to wonder if I'd walked into the wrong house

@henryseg I'm just imagining the overfull box errors when your time's up and they try to compile that TeX document at the pearly gates

@icecolbeveridge You can't spell topology without drawing at least three holes

@U_MagFhloinn @colourblindorg @sfbrownlee @therainbowbee That sounds like something I could fix! Will talk to my local R expert

@U_MagFhloinn @colourblindorg @sfbrownlee @therainbowbee Actually, looks like something's already been done: www-r--bloggers-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.r-blog…
Which bit of the docs did you want to see something about colourblindness in?

@monsoon0 @smh Have you read "Inventing the Mathematician"? It's got some good points about the use of historical mathematicians in textbooks. In short: beware that including loads of rich European dudes shapes the student's perception of who can be a mathematician.

@Ayliean @MathsGear @wilderlab had a proper set made a few years ago, which I bought some of. As far as I remember, it was a right knacker to manufacture.

@Ayliean @MathsGear @wilderlab Sorry, not @wilderlab at all! Not sure what I was thinking of. Anyway, the set I got was this: aperiodical.com/2012/09/penros…

There's got to be something in the fact that 'elucidate' and 'Euclid ate' are anagrams

@Ayliean I really like that!

eek!

@evariste1832 @peterrowlett @nrichmaths In particular, wild.maths.org has lots of activities that need research-like thinking.
And also give her a pile of marking to do and some mandatory GDPR training, for the real uni experience

I agree with all of this twitter.com/northumbriana/…

@hollykrieger Don't worry too much though, it goes the other way too. A pal of mine was once asked after a talk if he'd read the work of Cushing et al.
My pal's name: Cushing.

@extremefriday Noted

I'm a big fan of this sequence: oeis.org/A081512
"a(n) = smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of n of its distinct divisors"
(integer sequence reviews sadly still plummeting down the ravine @TweetsofCushing and I drove it into)

@Cshearer41 @_Kat_Agg I *do* have £9 to spare!

@robeastaway Division by 6: famously easy

@robeastaway £4.95?

What a nice idea! twitter.com/libraryncl/sta…

Rubbish airport breakfast.
Tines of fork: too weak to puncture skin of sausage.
Contents of sausage: too mushy to hold tines of fork.
#GuessImDrinkingThisSausage
#ooerr

@aperfect Do you have somewhere you write them down?

People who use the notation (a,b) for the gcd of a and b: I bet you're the kind of people who take up an extra seat on the bus with your bag

@glitch is it possible to link a project with a (new) github repo after it's created?

I and the other two members of the e-learning unit @NCLMathsStats have won the Vice Chancellor's Education Excellence Award for our work on @NclNumbas!

I'm not normally one to encourage a twitter hate mob... twitter.com/Pyfagorass/sta…

@mikeandallie Not sure if there's anything specifically mathematical on there at the mo, but @SciGalleryDub is worth a visit

@glitch ahh never mind, found the git stuff under "Tools". I clicked everything at the top of the page and never thought to look at the bottom!

@theoremoftheday I don't think it's unreasonable to insist on "gcd(a,b)". A bare set of brackets could mean so many things

@theoremoftheday what happens on scratch paper stays on scratch paper. My beef is with this set of lecture notes

@NCLMathsStats @NclNumbas ... and I've just had confirmation of my promotion!
(Well, new job description, because I have transcended categorisation)

I forgot that @Tegglington is on twitter. The award was also for his work on our tool which converts LaTeX lecture notes to accessible web pages, plus tons of other stuff. It's really good! Not yet open source, though twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@samira_mian I am well jel of that shed

@Mathowitz @missbrooksclass @Mathgarden @cbrownLmath 30 is really good for a first go!

@FryRsquared Congratulations!

I've fixed some bugs in my incredible palindromic hat-trick page, and explicitly checked every number up to 9 digits long. Phew!
So it's still true that every whole number can be written as the sum of 3 palindromes
somethingorotherwhatever.com/sum-of-3-palin…

@peterrowlett note to self: never thank Peter for anything

@evelynjlamb @icecolbeveridge Yes

@pwr2dppl It's 14C here today and I've been out in a t-shirt all day long. I've never related to a tweet less

Stress-testing the @NclNumbas LTI provider before a high-stakes exam due to take place tomorrow morning. Simulating 1200 sessions, each saving an answer every 5 seconds, with no problems. Exam is ~400 students, so phew! 😌

I really love this piece by @Gelada, in the @NCLMathsStats stairwell

@jjsanderson I'm having an ECG next month. I've never noticed there being too many electrodes

@wtgowers I don't think those reviews are real

@soupie66 @wtgowers No. Do I have to?

The geordie character on Gigglebiz is hate speech

I've just spotted this Hilbert curve marble run by @moebio: thingiverse.com/thing:3031891
It's a brilliant way of demonstrating what a Hilbert curve does

The exam went beautifully! Now enjoying the famous Newcastle sunshine

@CardColm If I want an approximation to 6/(sqrt(10)-sqrt(7)), I'll put it in my calculator. How is that more important than algebraic manipulation? In a country where less than half the population are comfortable with percentages, this is a silly argument to be having

A #clerihew:

Theresa May
Ran through fields of hay
Everything else she did was wronger
So she's PM no longer

@jamestanton That is an excellent picture and will be fixed in my mind from now on

@ZoeLGriffiths On our wedding day, it was raining all morning but lifted just as we said our vows, and the birds started singing. Reading between the lines of your forecast, that's probs what it's saying

Original art prints by Louise Perfect louiseart.anadigi.net

@icecolbeveridge Flashforge Finder. We plugged it in, and it worked. Takes standard sized filament. Not a spot of bother.

@helenarney @TheHooveringPod @jessicafostekew @lauralexx @brionymaybakes @WellsComFest Beware the exponential growth of sourdough starter! I wrote this with @stecks yonks ago: aperiodical.com/2012/05/grow-y…

DM me if you'd like to take part in the #bigmathoff 2019.

@icecolbeveridge July

After difficult night with the baby, open eyes to see it's bright daylight, and feel awake enough to start the day. Infer that it must be a reasonable time to get up, maybe you even slept in a bit.

FIVE. THIRTY.

@Sara_Tindall Currently happening. We need to get up at 6 to catch a plane, and she's slept through for the first time in ages

The worst sign in the world

I'm "down from level 1 to the toilets on level 1". What are you?

@stecks Ta

@Wikunia_de All the numbers correspond to floors. Newcastle barely has one terminal!

#bigmathoff 2019 is happening! Just emailed all 16 of this year's competitors.

Visiting my dad, who lives in an unfinished quake 1 mod

@matheknitician @peterrowlett Currently one repeat.

@eqdynamics It looks like that ceiling is full of clipping errors

There aren't enough logic puzzles about two parents trying to exchange an unwieldy item while carrying both a baby and everything the baby owns

A mechanical puzzle: the baby has grabbed my glasses. I have to close my eyes so she doesn't blind me with their arms, but then I can't see where she's about to ram (or throw) them

A public announcement puzzle where two sets of parents have to work out particular information about each other's babies, solely by loudly declaring facts to their own babies

@Kit_Yates_Maths @honeypisquared @ajk_44 @nrichmaths @plusmathsorg @MathsWorldUK @maths_week @MathsJam @SparksMaths @SamDurbin1 For consistency, is a human a kind of humanoid?

@profRoys Under what circumstances would you say that a uni needs to change more slowly? It's easy to identify things we're not doing yet

@profRoys I might not have phrased my point very well. What could be the downsides of reducing this friction?

Feeling mildly affronted when your phone fails to autocorrect a perfectly cromulent collection of typos

@glitch isthisprime.com

Number of books containing a sentence longer than the entire text of "Dear Zoo" @wacnt

@HilariousCow That's a good insight

Have installed Toca Kitchen for the little L-P to play with.
It's not her turn yet 🤫

@HilariousCow Not sure you need to

Absolute horror after moving furniture round and plugging in my @Raspberry_Pi containing all our photos and backups: drive mounts, but is totally empty apart from 'swapfile' 😵

Considered jumping out a window, before finding the USB hub has an on/off button I needed to press 😅

@Raspberry_Pi (don't worry, I have a second backup too, after *last time*)

Thanks to @evelynjlamb's newsletter, I've discovered Missing Numbers, a blog by @darkgreener about numbers the government should be tracking but isn't.
missingnumbers.org

Today's ECG was only three electrodes @jjsanderson

This has given me some brain problems twitter.com/Nereide/status…

Today's the day this tweeter learned about windows

@icecolbeveridge @WrongButUseful @reflectivemaths You could mention the #bigmathoff. I haven't decided who's in your group yet

@standupmaths And shelix cinema. They've decided to call off date night

@northumbriana How have I not heard if that!

Crikey, just noticed that isthisprime.com/game/ is approaching the 1.5 million games played mark.
There are some stats to play with at isthisprime.com/game/record.php

@DavidKButlerUoA @mathsjem that is some top trivia!

@evelynjlamb I feel like there should be a form you can fill in to certify that you've fully considered both your and your partner's roles in the house, and whether a cleaning appliance is an acceptable gift. Something like canibuymyspouseahoover.com

A man just as tall as me has nabbed the front seat with all the legroom on this empty @My_Metro. Now, should we be legroom buddies or should I find somewhere else to sit?

Does anyone need a set of orthogonal whiteboard markers? #3dprinted

This year's "GCSE Maths exam hard" story doesn't seem to pick out an individual question for condemnation: unilad.co.uk/featured/gcse-…
Is this progress?

Your idiot colleagues: store whiteboard pens on end to get all the ink out
You, an intellectual: store them flat to make sure the solvent mixes properly
Me, a bona fide genius:

@Ri_Science I think you mean *shudders in Southerner*

@elinoroberts congratulations!!!

Currently #3dprinting notched planks to make a model of the roof of the Sheldonian theatre.
See if you can spot a youthful CP in this @mathsinthecity document: maths.ox.ac.uk/system/files/a…

@stecks @aPaulTaylor Natural History Museum, surely

It's taking shape!

@icecolbeveridge @ajk_44 reset the parallelepiped counter, please

@ajk_44 @icecolbeveridge Made the mistake of asking a student what he's working on

Managed to crash the lift (in a software way, not physically).
Quite proud of that.

@robinhouston @panlepan are you just reading from "Foolproof"? ams.org/notices/200501…

I've published a couple of #3dprint designs on thingiverse:
Write angles cube thingiverse.com/thing:3686353
Sheldonian theatre roof: thingiverse.com/thing:3688567

Sizes of infinity:

the number of whole numbers
<
the number of real numbers
<
the number of times my daughter wants to bake a cake in the Miffy's World game

All I Want for Christmas is Pu twitter.com/harrietalida/s…

@robinhouston I'm currently on a beach, but later on I want to check if the ShortLex ordering of the naturals by Roman representation is in

I've made an incident counter using @glitch.
incident-counter.glitch.me/parallelepiped

@glitch *ahem*
incident-counter.glitch.me/wasted-work-ti…

@sxpmaths I was ready to come in with 'rational and fraction aren't necessarily synonyms', but the rest of the text makes even that charitable interpretation impossible

@miclugo I'm currently having the same struggle. Why do they make it such a deep colour?!

@profRoys Soon to be renamed the Conservative and Solipsist Party

You've probably played dots and boxes. Can you beat the computer at dots and *triangles*?
Try this, by Tomas Rokicki
tomas.rokicki.com/dottri.html

A yak-shaving day:
Our website broke because a wordpress plugin decided to make one of its features paid-only.
So: write our own plugin.
Need: a development WP server
Problem: work PC is so out of date
Now falling down a rabbit hole of dependencies for docker

I want to use docker-compose, but it tries to run my system's Python 2, which has a broken version of pyopenssl. I don't have root, so I need a python virtual environment.

if fewer than half of the nouns in those tweets make sense to you: consider yourself lucky

@RAnachro what does that mean and how would it help me?

@RAnachro ah. I just copied /usr/bin/docker-compose to my home bin directory, and changed the top line to use /usr/bin/env python instead of /usr/bin/python

Conclusion: the documentation for Gutenberg block development is not yet complete enough to be useful

@Pyfagorass Well, are you?

@MattPDickinson @OpposeCorbynism well, you've just made me aware of it

Recently I've started putting gherkins in my ham sandwich and I don't think I can eat anything else now.
Vinegar is life.

This is an odd bot twitter.com/LetSandwich/st…

When I buy just a few things at a supermarket, I like to play a game I call "impromptu Macgyver".
Today: size 5 nappy pants, burger buns, slices of cheese and a pot of tahini.
What ingenious use am I putting all of those to?

Has anyone compared the membership of the conservative party with the size of the electorate before the 1832 Reform Act?

Wikipedia says the electorate before 1832 was about 400,000, or around 3.3% of the population.
The Conservative party now has 124,000 members, or around 0.2% of the population.
I thought it'd be closer!

@TimHarford I'd like some evidence for that. I bet there are people getting by with really knacky toilets because they don't understand enough, or got a non-plumber to fix it

@kyledevans And Suarez seems to have got the immigration paperwork done in under 60 seconds, in between scoring for both teams

@honeypisquared @tishateaches @SaraHottinger She's on twitter?! 🤩

@SophieBays @ch_nira @GingerTom92 @Tony_Mann @FraserProf @mathsExplorers Where did you get that? I want one!

Functional analysisters twitter.com/funnymaths/sta…

Homotopeople

@3bits Hey, call Samaritans

@honeypisquared "Don't lick the baby!"

My first two-colour #3dprint wasn't a *complete* failure!

@C_J_Smith whoop! High fives!

@badmachinery I don't know if I'm brave enough to look back at my scrobbling history. Back when I was using it, someone on last.fm sent me a message because I was listening to Eels so much, and I took that as a sign I should reassess my life

@kyledevans He'll even steal the shirt off your back?! I'm right off this fella

@sangwinc @C_J_Smith I wish we had one of those! I spent yesterday writing a document on learning design for our student interns

@sangwinc @C_J_Smith Wait a mo, I think *I'm* our one of those. Rats.

Am I going mad, or does the new wordpress block editor replace double backslashes with single slashes when you paste into it?

@yenergy I don't know if you primed me to think that or if I would've had the same reaction unprompted, but I think I'm with you.
That's too many of the same thing to be in one place.

@alexcorner But you got your #bigmathoff pitch in to me, so your priorities are in order 👍

So if I have 60% packet loss to my own router, what problem do I have?

@PaulsPrattle Consider? I've done it three times today

The hottest say of the year so far is a good day to stand in a crowded room for 8 hours and be enthusiastic to potential maths students, right? #nclvisit

@My_Metro if I tapped in before realising there's a replacement bus on, so I'm going to drive into town instead, how do I tap out without going to another metro station?

@My_Metro Pay as you go

@My_Metro Thanks!

@legolasismine I'm stood next to a table filled with Danish pastries. You've got it worse, sorry

I've just scheduled the first #BigMathOff post, to go out 9am tomorrow morning. It's nearly here!

@Steve_Perfect we moved house before that happened to our bin. I am in awe of your composting skills

The #BigMathOff has an unofficial sticker album! The (in)estimable @mscroggs has set up
mathoffstickerbook.com
Share stickers with me:
mathoffstickerbook.com/friend/Md7OU4G…

@icecolbeveridge @mscroggs same

@mscroggs @peterrowlett @icecolbeveridge You need my favourite database restraint which could also serve as a 90s pop single title: unique together

This is the content I come to this website for twitter.com/funnymaths/sta…

@honeypisquared But... my mortgage?

@honeypisquared Missed opportunity to get in the Tom Jones/The Cardigans banger "Burning Down the House"

@SamHartburn Quick one, harder if you're doing it in your head: what does a triangle on a sphere with internal angles summing to 3π radians look like?

@SheckyR I don't think publishing odds, even as a joke, is helpful

@SamHartburn and there's always mathstodon.xyz/@dudeney_puzzl…

@alexcorner @honeypisquared I'm really looking forward to seeing how this one goes. Two very different styles of exposition.

@FOTSN little L-P's first (and probably last?) encounter with a floppy disk

@alexcorner @benjamin_leis I've *just* realised that e represents that base of the natural log, and not a generic identity element.

@AnonMathMom We've been through that. There's an uneasy peace maintained by regular payments of balls to the dog. On the plus side, the baby has developed a very accurate 'dog biting this ball with her sharp teeth' mime

@peterrowlett @FlintyMcQwerty @aperiodical new pic who dis

@ToonSlim @FryRsquared @alexcorner @honeypisquared "math-off" is easier to say than "maths-off". That's pretty much the entirety of the logic to that

@matheknitician That's what they call me on the mean streets of Whitley Bay

Just 15 minutes left to vote in the @panlepan v @plusmathsorg #BigMathOff match, before today's starts: aperiodical.com/2019/07/the-bi…

@SophieBays crikey, that's my old school!

Bot idea: tweet daily news headlines accompanied by a screenshot of a 3×3 Civ 2 grid.

@becky_k_warren Ooh, that diagram looks familiar! Might make an appearance in the #bigmathoff if I've read my notes properly

Excellent thread twitter.com/erik_kaars/sta…

Doing some #BigMathOff admin on my day off while the baby sleeps. There's some really good stuff coming up in the next few days!

@KarenCampe @aperiodical @icecolbeveridge @kyledevans just did a few minutes ago, or so I thought

Self-visualising data. Guess which is the little L-P's favourite colour

@honeypisquared @PaulsPrattle

@SophieBays Glad to hear it!

@DavidKButlerUoA Ooh, that's very satisfying

@LoomesGill @Shona_Mu I have an arrangement with the office that they'll help me with forms and things, even when I'm supposed to do them myself

Is there a conventional name for the set of rationals closed under taking square roots? It's not ℝ because it doesn't include the transcendentals, and it doesn't include things like ∛2.

Correct answer twitter.com/daan_van_berke…

@RAnachro Yes, that's what led me to the question. I feel like something like ℚ[√] should do

@thinkmaths @aperiodical #MattOnYourMind

I'm really enjoying the #BigMathOff, both the entries and people's reactions to them. Thanks all round!

@kyledevans One of my jobs next week is to go to the toy shop and buy some toy goats. Thank you for the warning

@SparksMaths @becky_k_warren @GioHio @aperiodical The voting will continue until morale improves

@GioHio It's a way of getting 54 bits of fun maths from a wide group of people, most of whom I'd never met before. I'm doing everything I can to make the competition aspect unimportant.

@samira_mian Have you seen a coaster like this before? It's from imagesdorient.com

@samira_mian I got mine in a cookery shop in The Hague. They get around!

@benjamin_leis @CmonMattTHINK @DavidKButlerUoA And with 10 trillion marbles?

Email from me pal Jez saying Labour would campaign for Remain in a second ref. Finally!

@SheckyR @icecolbeveridge @stecks @mscroggs you can try bribing Matt, but I can't see how it'll help

@ch_nira @aperiodical I had that thought just last night! This year, just keeping up with getting the pitches on the site has used up a lot of my time. I'll see if I can do something at some point.

@ch_nira @aperiodical I have a feeling I set up a JSON endpoint for @mscroggs's ceefax page. Fancy whipping up a graph, Matthew?

@mscroggs @ch_nira @aperiodical Almost definitely

@mscroggs @icecolbeveridge @stecks I'm enjoying the stickers though

@colinjcotter Yeah, but it feels a bit closer than what he's said before

@mscroggs @ch_nira @aperiodical Try this: aperiodical.com/wp-json/wp-pol…

@johndavidread @aperiodical Yeah, I think 24 hours is a bit too short. I only needed an extra day to allow 48 hours in the group stage, but that pushed the final into August, when I'm on holiday. The other option was more than one match starting per day, which I think is too much to keep up with

@johndavidread @aperiodical Yeah, that's what I meant - it entails another day before the result is known, which pushes the schedule into August

@matheknitician @johndavidread @aperiodical Exactly

@mscroggs @ch_nira @aperiodical @honeypisquared @3blue1brown and here it is a graph of percentages! I just got back to my desk and found my old Jupyter notebook.

#BigMathOff twitter.com/JimPropp/statu…

Here's a #math #3dprint I've just made.
What can you say about these pieces?

When I stack them on top of each other, this is what it looks like.
What do you notice?

@honeypisquared Farts-in-waiting

@benjamin_leis @honeypisquared Uhhh, you mean @SophieBays

@SophieBays @honeypisquared @benjamin_leis We've already got one competitor made of two people, so two competitors made of one person wouldn't be a huge upset

@kyledevans @aperiodical @becky_k_warren Every day! Time to take a hatchet to the polls plugin

@honeypisquared @SophieBays @benjamin_leis Does that mean... eeeeee!!!

Has anyone been following along with the #BigMathOff using a screenreader or other assistive tech? Was anything important inaccessible? Please say it was worth my while writing out all that alt text, I feel bad I haven't had time to check YouTube captions.

We're halfway through the group stage of the #BigMathOff! Whoop!

Why did I volunteer to do this much admin?

@JimPropp I think @alexcorner can teach you a thing or two about brevity

@metroapologises Have some ambition: faulty aircon might interfere with the wifi

@peterrowlett Crikey! Lends new meaning to the phrase 'railway sleeper'.

@panlepan There's a site called aperiodical.com that will publish anything you write about your favourite maths, any time of year. 😉
The math-off provides motivation, though, which is 90% of the battle

@becky_k_warren @panlepan would it help if I shared figures like number of readers, at the end?
They're quite good

I needed to get this out of my head @standupmaths

@ajk_44 @becky_k_warren @easternmaths ahh, is that what it is? I'll change it to a link

@ajk_44 @becky_k_warren @easternmaths I've updated the post so you have to press a button before the geogebra app loads. Please tell me if that fixes it

@ajk_44 @becky_k_warren @easternmaths you discovered my secret middle name, revealed only when my name is spoken backwards

As promised, I have taken a hatchet to the wordpress plugin powering the #BigMathOff polls. Hopefully they'll all behave from now on.

@peterrowlett Are you still on the train?

@honeypisquared @JimPropp If you haven't read Jim's blog, please do. He's one of my favourite writers about maths.

@umbernhard @standupmaths I originally had it that way round, but then I thought someone would point out that his hair was quite glossy

@SophieBays @aperiodical YouTube can do it automatically. I just need to go through and check the maths words

@C_J_Smith @peterrowlett Best to nip that in the bud: it's imaginary, not jmagjnary

Totes putting this on a t-shirt twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@aperiodical @kyledevans @becky_k_warren Where have I seen a 52%-48% split before?

@jolyonjenkins I'm still cross about the roofer who, after refusing to take payment by bank transfer, said "it's not worth paying tax on little jobs like this"

@icecolbeveridge Wait until I tell you about the absolutely brilliant tournament structure I've come up with for next year's #BigMathOff

@kyledevans @becky_k_warren @aperiodical @mscroggs Too soon.

I get the strong impression that if my daughter could say "for God's sake, Dad, look lively!" she would.
#SixAM

Newcastle pals who work near the centre for life: is there a toddler friendly cafe nearby? (I'm not going in the fun bit, to head off the obvious answer)

I'm preparing the #BigMathOff posts for the week. You've got so many treats coming your way!
And the silly sports have all finished today. We're only halfway through!

@matheknitician @srcav @RealityMinus3 @icecolbeveridge @aperiodical @becky_k_warren @bluecombats I've just sent you 50 bonus stickers. Hope it's in there!

Are you kidding.

Some good questions about how the #BigMathOff plays out twitter.com/SheckyR/status…

@C_J_Smith @TheLabAndField Send it to us

Today's #BigMathOff match contains two brilliant pitches. If you haven't voted yet, do! I'm glad I'm exempt, I'm not sure which I'd pick, cows or calculus.
aperiodical.com/2019/07/the-bi…

HOW DO YOU PASTE A BACKSLASH INTO THE NEW WORDPRESS EDITOR

@PaulsPrattle guess again! It strips them out, for reasons that I'm sure sounded good at the time

(you're also in for a treat tomorrow, and have had indistinguishably brilliant treats for the previous fortnight!)

@DrCaroSummers Of course a linguist would know all the alt codes! I can type a single backslash, but they get stripped out when I paste a block if text in.

In case you didn't see me at work today, it was a lot like this twitter.com/northumbriana/…

@icecolbeveridge 6 1 de siste

@kyledevans Now you mention it, a super over isn't a bad idea for the Extremely Fair Tiebreaker

Well, gang, I lasted half an hour doing real work before nerdsniping myself. Might have pretty pictures to share in a mo

So, @robeastaway tweeted, which made me think about zequals.
It's his brilliant time-saving device: when doing arithmetic, forget about all the digits after the first one.
For example, 123 z≈ 100.
You can look at the relative error of zequals compared to doing it precisely

If even the different kinds of digit are too much to keep in your head, you can also do zequals in binary. Here's what that looks like:

But I'm always looking for ways to do worse. So, what if you did zequals, but instead of keeping the most significant digit, you kept the least significant (non-zero) one? I'll call that 'meequals',
For example, 123 m= 300.
What does the relative error of that look like?

It looks like this! The error changes drastically from one number to the next, but you can still see the fractal-ish pattern. That's interesting!
But don't let the scaling on the plot fool you: this method is way, way worse than zequals.

@robeastaway Good point! Will modify my code after this graduation ceremony

@becky_k_warren @helenarney we had that! And a Europe one too

Just found out that when your toddler turns on Google assistant and says 'mama', it shows information about the 2013 horror film 'Mama'

@panlepan @stevenstrogatz Or even 𒁹

@VickyMaths1729 @OddsAndEvenings @aperiodical @alexcorner I've just approved a few comments, including yours. The consensus seems to be that the conjecture is true (phrased in varying levels of "it's obvious")

@HigherGeometer Elsevier is Dutch, so the GDPR should allow you to ask for your email address to be removed from their database

@HigherGeometer Or do you need to be an EU citizen? I can't remember

@HigherGeometer yes, the GDPR allows you to request that your data is removed from the database, not just unsubscribe from the emails

tfw your employer gives your unit £5,000 in recognition of the excellent work you do making an open source e-assessment system, then your commercial competitor gets $7 million from investment funds

(Newcastle spends a significant chunk of money on employing me, Chris and George to develop and support Numbas, and gives it away to the wider world, which it doesn't need to do. That is the value of a public service institution)

A mention of rithmomachia will always catch my eye, but this one's really something: arxiv.org/abs/1509.03177
The authors have found a way to extend rithmomachia to infinitely-wide boards!
Fancy a game, anyone? Won't take a moment. @standupmaths @tomscott @jamesgrime @stecks

In happier #BigMathOff news, the world's most interesting mathematician (2018) has had a nice day in Greenwich twitter.com/ch_nira/status…

@lyzidiamond @glitch What?!?! How?

@lyzidiamond @glitch So is python already installed? The Ruby example in one of the other replies had a glitch.json file - is that documented somewhere? Sorry if I could've found it easily, I'm reading all this on my phone

@icecolbeveridge Apart from the match on the 24th?

@peterrowlett @icecolbeveridge

@stevenstrogatz Sumaze from @MEIMaths is a very good puzzle game at that level

@C_J_Smith "Irish night"

@wtgowers That's got to be a glitch in the matrix.

@ColinTheMathmo the ICO: ico.org.uk/make-a-complai…

I've had a couple of student interns, Holly and Alex, working with me on #3dprinted #math for the last few weeks. They've done some brilliant work, which we'll be sharing. For now, I want to show you this kaleidocycle designed by Alex. It printed as one piece - that blew my mind!

The question I have at the moment is: what's the locus of the points on this thing?

@matheknitician Of course!

@soupie66 How weird! It's just a 3d printed thingy rotating. My hands are in shot, so maybe it thought it was a nudey show

@k_houston_math Yes!

*goes on a wild chip-eating binge*
*keeps precise count of how many were eaten*
Only explanation: Dracula twitter.com/MoMath1/status…

Your best ideas for when you'd want this instead of a set of compasses, please twitter.com/MachinePix/sta…

@koszuldude there should also be an embargo on saying "my child sleeps through the night!" until they're 18

It's the penultimate match of the #BigMathOff group stage! This one really matters, if you're following the competition: whoever wins today goes through to the semi-final.
(If you're not, it's worth a look for two bits of fun maths) twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

I can't believe this account has fewer followers than I do. It's really good! twitter.com/CarveHerName/s…

is nobody bothered that it doesn't actually draw circles?

anyway, I'll only accept one alternative circle-drawer, and it's the thaMographe: thamtham.fr
youtube.com/watch?v=6XHpEy…

Here's the thingiverse entry for the kaleidocycle, with files you can print or customise: thingiverse.com/thing:3763476

@elinoroberts so he can't pretend in his first speech that he's going to be able to govern, I suppose

@icecolbeveridge I don't think that's quite it - the distances between the points aren't constant - but it makes a nice shape

@icecolbeveridge You must be right that the centres are always in the same plane. So does that mean that the hinges don't move in circles?

I feel like the author of this form and I disagree on some major aspects of ontology

@icecolbeveridge I did some fiddling to get it to work, and the middles don't seem to stay in the same plane. It confused me so I stopped!

@AlexSGWilson OK, that's a good reason

@coffem0m @shiffman @thecodingtrain I used regularexpressions.info a lot

@SophieBays @VickyMaths1729 *twiddles moustache*
Now you HAVE to do more maths!

*cries in Northern*
Imagine getting anywhere for £1.50!
Imagine knowing how much the bus will cost before getting on it! twitter.com/adambecket/sta…

@intersectarian choose!

@samjshah2 Could you write a quick piece about this for the @aperiodical?

I've just realised the train I've booked for #tmip2019 at the end of August leaves Newcastle at 05:58.
The perils of using the "arrive by" option on the booking form!

@thamographe that's a very good point!

John Lewis's men's section is brilliant if you like wearing plain blue, or occasionally brown

@icecolbeveridge that looks right!

@robeastaway You were in Newcastle?!

@robeastaway Lots of (most?) cafes, restaurants, and other places with taps in the centre of Newcastle have stickers up saying they'll fill your water bottle for you. A big public water fountain would be helpful too

I've had a coupe of days to think about @honeypisquared's #BigMathOff pitch, and I'm still not completely sure how I feel.
I'd like to hear your opinions! twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

@KarenCampe @aperiodical @samjshah2 but the whole thing's about working out why that pattern breaks, right? Anyway, if I'm going to change it I had esprit d'escalier this morning and realised "chord progressions" would've been way better

@KarenCampe @aperiodical @samjshah2 I've changed it to "an unexpected chord progression". Hooray compromise!

@extremefriday @honeypisquared I've heard rumours it's a 30,000 word essay on Morse theory

Testify! twitter.com/MhairiMcF/stat…

@peterrowlett Does he know all the jelly beans' names yet?

@northumbriana At least they haven't offered us a plaster cast of it, like the Elgin marbles

Well, I managed an entire month before having to type up a #MathOff post the morning of. I've got a bone to pick with whoever scheduled the final for Mrs L-P's birthday

did it!!! Two minutes to spare!

I've finally completed the #BigMathOff sticker book. I didn't have time to trawl through making swap requests, so I've just been accepting requests other people send me.
I've got 39 spare stickers left. If you're still playing, send me a swap request: mathoffstickerbook.com/friend/Md7OU4G…

While investigating this, I made this lovely plot, which I want on a t-shirt or a poster or something twitter.com/david_cobac/st…

@stecks I am currently moving at about 50mph away from the code that made it happen

@samjshah2 Is it true that any permutation of the columns (or rows) would produce another grid with the same property? In that case, I want to do something like sort the columns, and see if that looks nice.

@samjshah2 Want to hear my argument?

@samjshah2 Suppose swapping columns A and B introduces a bad rectangle.
Then at least one side of the rectangle must be in column A or B, say A w.l.o.g.
Then swapping the columns back puts that side of the rectangle in column B. But that's the initial arrangement, which had no rectangles

@samjshah2 I think you can express this as "the number of bad rectangles is invariant under permutations of the rows and columns"

@icecolbeveridge Don't make me write a rulebook

@icecolbeveridge I've just realised that every game of cricket ever has been played on the surface of a sphere, so one team could just stand on the other side of the boundary and declare the other team out of bounds

If @SophieBays's #BigMathOff pitch today has sparked a fascination with the prosecutor's fallacy, this is the quiz for you! twitter.com/d_spiegel/stat…

@SophieBays I was hoping someone would save me some work and pitch a schedule this year, but no luck!

@icecolbeveridge it's happening again twitter.com/i/events/11562…

@icecolbeveridge @hartkp I'm not against it, but I'm not all for it either.
The Maclaurin series for e^x, in RPN, is:

1 x x 2 ^ 2 ! / x 3 ^ 3 ! / ... + + + ...

@honeypisquared @panlepan Welcome to the fraught world of gendered nouns in French

@icecolbeveridge @hartkp it could, but my point was about how awkward expressions with lots of terms look. I'm sure there's been some cognitive science done about this.

@icecolbeveridge @hartkp You also encounter problems when trying to write down the general formula: how do you write the differential operator? And then, how do you write the derivative of the composition of two functions? I think you end up needing a function application operation

@northumbriana we sold our house to him. Very nice man

@SheckyR man, I wish I was getting paid for this

@samjshah2 as a consolation prize, here's a 40x40 image of you that is also a prime number (I think)

@JulianMaths @mathsjem yes, it's really good. Properly hard though!

@samjshah2 @Gelada @zacharyabel ahhh, so sorry! I actually made the image data for the en-primed version, but that's the original. Hang on...

grep "simply" -r instructions_written_by_student

find instructions_written_by_student -type f -exec sed -i "s/ simply//g" {} \;

@samjshah2 @Gelada @zacharyabel Here you go. Not quite as nice this time. It seems to occasionally get lucky and find a prime without changing too much, and other times messes things up. I'm sure I could apply some simple divisibility tricks to the last few digits to make it quicker

@jjsanderson I had two students spend six weeks writing some instructions on 3d printing. They did some great stuff, but I now realise I should've kept a closer eye on their writing style

@samjshah2 @Gelada @zacharyabel ah! It found this one after only changing 104 pixels. That's pretty much ideal

@jjsanderson sub-editing doesn't currently feel like it'd be any quicker than just writing it myself. I know that's not true, though. They were really good!

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!
(I'm trying to learn #blender)

Ha!

@mscroggs so is the #BigMathOff definitely back next year too?

@johncarlosbaez Since D.H. Lehmer was involved, I bet the proof was computational. Lehmer was the inventor of the photoelectric number sieve: computerhistory.org/collections/ca…

@mscroggs @matheknitician I've basically signed myself up for not having any free time in July each year. This year was a lot more efficient than last year, though.

@zacharyabel @dandersod @MathyMcMatherso @samjshah2 @Gelada ... wait a minute, I have a huge HPC cluster available to me. Something to play with when I'm back in work next week!

@zacharyabel @arundquist @Gelada @samjshah2 @dandersod While we're talking dithering algorithms, for a long time I've been meaning to have a go at implementing Hilbert curve dithering: possiblywrong.wordpress.com/2017/12/26/hil…

@zacharyabel @arundquist @Gelada @samjshah2 @dandersod for reference, here's my Python prime-image-finding notebook: gist.github.com/christianp/8b0…

@SophieBays @SamHartburn @icecolbeveridge @mscroggs @matheknitician Thanks for the offers of help, everyone. ♥
95% of the work is typesetting the pitches in wordpress, and I couldn't work out a good way of sharing that even with Katie. I'd have to have much bigger lead times, which wouldn't be fair on the competitors. I'll do some thinking

@honeypisquared @SophieBays @SamHartburn @icecolbeveridge @mscroggs @matheknitician I'd take that up in a heartbeat

@kyledevans 👋

@0apropos @aperiodical Sorry, you'll have to go cold turkey

@icecolbeveridge @SophieBays @0apropos @aperiodical Actually, I was just considering a league format for next year...

@benjamin_leis @icecolbeveridge @SophieBays @0apropos @aperiodical Getting the pitches on the site. Lots of image and video uploading, retyping maths as latex, writing alt text

@mathsjem @Mathematical_A We've still got maths year 2000 posters up in our stairwells. 🧓

@JanvierUK They'll solve any mystery!

@JanvierUK ... me?
I like to read the credits, OK?

@JanvierUK If you don't read the credits you don't find out about incredible people like Nikolay Fartunkov m.imdb.com/name/nm3046916/

It's reassuring to know that in 2019 children's birthday party DJs still start with Mambo No. 5

My daughter is drinking a Fruit Shoot. Pray for us

@icecolbeveridge IT'S BEGUN 🦈

@icecolbeveridge We are now riding shotgun

@panlepan @wilderlab @TradeTexasBig Yeah, I vaguely remember doing that

Having a toddler is like playing Monkey Island sometimes. Just now I was holding a blue balloon, a stuffed chicken, and a bowl of cereal.
I just worked out that I need to "USE teddy WITH fabulous jewels" in order to get her out of bed.

Answer: twenty years ago.
@TynemouthPool

@peterrowlett A classic ruse

@C_J_Smith Uh oh uh oh uh oh!

I didn't know this! Way more noble than Galois.
(what is it about impending doom that makes French people do maths?) twitter.com/sesmith/status…

@FOTSN Helen L-P is v v v interested

Trying out a new puzzle on Mrs L-P

The passive voice is being edited out of this document.

That was surprisingly intuitive!
Must resist the temptation to sit and play it all day twitter.com/panlepan/statu…

Oh my god. I actually have to solve the word problem in a group.
I never expected my master's dissertation to be useful!
(available at somethingorotherwhatever.com/old/the%20word… if you're interested)

@pkrautz server ran out of space again. I don't know how other instances avoid this - there's no automatable task to clear up preview cards that fill up the disk

@ben_nuttall Sounds like a project idea to me

I'm a big fan of this twitter.com/intersectarian…

@ShriramKMurthi Clearing is for students who didn't get the grades necessary for the unis they got offers from. In England and Wales, unis make offers before you've got your grades. When results come out, there's a mad dash to find a place

@ShriramKMurthi Unis below the top tier, i.e. not Oxford or Cambridge, try to get students who didn't apply to them but are at least as good as the students who did (and now, just try to bulk out their numbers with students they can just about justify taking)

@ShriramKMurthi @elinoroberts Not at all! You'd do everything by phone on clearing day. The UK isn't *that* small!

The word 'hyperboligami' popped into my head this morning and now I need to make it happen

Identify the error correcting code. These cards came with my daughter's new toy

@robinhouston We haven't got any batteries for it yet, so no idea

@robinhouston I think that's exactly what's happening. I wonder if there's any more consideration for which 6

@profhelenwilson @intersectarian @El_Timbre @honeypisquared This idea's got legs

Just licked my phone's screen.
Defence: I'm making brownies

Current status: whipping eggs with a potato masher.
#selfcatering

Mixed fractions on an Italian restaurant menu!
I wonder how members of @BTNMathsJam and @PisaMathsJam feel about that

@Cshearer41 Which one is yellow?

@Cshearer41 Not distinctly at all for my colourblind eyes!

@Cshearer41 It's a complicated topic, and hard to act on any advice with felt tips. Standard advice is to use pattern as well as colour, e.g. dots and stripes. I did some work on diagrams recently, with examples at numbas.github.io/numbas-extensi…
(including copies of some of your puzzles!)

@Cshearer41 Yes, I can almost always do your puzzles. Thanks for making the effort!

@honeypisquared With that kind of attitude you'll never get to nationals

@EminDuman1963 @Cshearer41 Except what looks light to you might look dark to me

I love how the @glitch code editor highlights all other occurrences of the text you've got selected. Makes it very easy to see where things are used

Watching my friend's teenage son mow our lawn is like watching the DVD idle graphic

@C_J_Smith Solidarity. (no pun intended)

One day I'll swirl a hot chocolate around a mug without getting it all over myself. Not today though. #dyspraxia

@aperfect @thetrainline It's not the trainline's problem, there just isn't an under 5 ticket on LNER. You could book a child ticket

They did lots of good work making mathematical things, and then I asked them to put together this guidebook in the last couple of weeks.
I hope it'll be useful for staff and students here, and maybe even outside Newcastle.
It could do with more care, but it's passable right now.

The #3dprinting #math material that my summer students Holly and Alex created is now online at mas.ncl.ac.uk/3dprintguide/

Finally, that site was created with the same system we use to turn LaTeX course notes into accessible web pages.
Not quite the right tool for the job, but it meant the tool got some much-needed improvements.
It'll be open source... at some point. Not mine to release!

One of the most important bits is the "things we've made" page - mas.ncl.ac.uk/3dprintguide/i… - with source files and thingiverse links for all the objects they produced.

@MouldS very nice Steve but my mug is round, I want a circled circle

Maths vocab question: when do two variables represent the 'same' value?
Let x be the number of biscuits in my left hand, and y the number of biscuits in my right hand.
If I have two biscuits in each hand, do x and y represent the same value, or are they still different 'things'?

@Helen31098957 not currently

@samholloway But x isn't identically equal to y, right?

@agbuckley @samholloway I very deliberately said two of the same kind of thing. I think there's still a difference between them to be preserved

@apgox Is that what that is?

I'll add some context: I was writing about algebraic simplification. I wanted to say that x and y represent different values, so they can't be collected together, e.g. 'x+y" can't be rewritten '2x'. But x and y might *coincidentally* have the same value.

So how do you describe the 'differentness' of x and y without talking about what they represent? They are different, but in what ways?

@elinoroberts Oh, now I do too

@peterrowlett I really feel like we're missing a word.

@henryseg are there two misaligned tilings meeting in the middle?

@ajk_44 @geogebra what's the bottom half showing?

@ajk_44 @geogebra aha!

I hav com up wit a gre tim sav dev. As wel as rou num to thr sig fig, I hav sta rou all my wor to thr sig let. Wit the spa sav by thi met I can fit muc mor int eac twe, lea roo for ext con, lik thi lov poe:

Ros are red,
Vio are blu,
I lik to go
For a dip in the poo

#3sl

@MadMatheMatiker @davidwees Only 2% of people can see the colour bluel

Little L-P is having her second nursery visit today, so I'm working from home. 'Home' is currently a cafe next door to the nursery (what a sap I am).
Anyway, while she's achieving, I'm achieving too: I've made the first step toward a choose-your-own-adventure mode for @NclNumbas.

Your suggestions of mathematical puzzles that have a few significantly different solution methods, please.
Ideally, ones where seeing a list of possible methods wouldn't constitute a spoiler.

@SparksMaths Ooh yes, that's just the kind of thing I want!

I take issue with the use of the words "any" and "any" in that headline twitter.com/Mathematical_A…

@kyledevans @robeastaway @SparksMaths Does the neat observation involve the fact 4=3+1?

@DavidB52s Someone else sent me that one in a DM. It's lovely, but a bit beyond what I was thinking of. I really just wanted some toy examples to play with in my e-assessment system

@JanvierUK There'd be all the usual trouble with who in particular in those countries gets the money, and whether conserving the environment means moving people out

A Smullyan-esque dialogue in this episode of Waffle the Wonder Dog:

Evie: "Now do you understand what yes and no mean?"
Waffle: "Yes!"

Did you know that @UniofNewcastle acceptance letters come foil-wrapped?
That's because we're part of the Rustle Group of universities.

@jamestanton Do you have anything in exploding dots on treating fractions as two parallel tracks of dots?

@ben_nuttall Exceptional!

What's the smallest name? Can you beat Millicent?

@LargeCardinal @FishermansEnemy @standupmaths @aperiodical I saw a very similar mug in @jamesgrime's hands recently. I think he was trying to get them made up for mathsgear.co.uk.
He agreed it's genus 3

@blatherwick_sam Very strong!

Here's a prototype of a "choose your own adventure" mode for @NclNumbas.
It makes it easy to write explorations where the student can decide what info they want, and you can offer follow-up questions based on what they do.
How would you use this feature?
youtube.com/watch?v=bTTGJD…

Has anyone seen this before? Looks like flexible quadrilateral-ish pieces that join together. I wonder if it'd be any good for making hyperbolic models

@elinoroberts Ooh yes please! At work or at home?

@samjshah If you want a Fermi problem, I thought of a nice one recently: the number of people who got engaged yesterday

My body is apparently getting ready for my absurdly early train to #tmip19 tomorrow by waking up at 4:45. Again, that train is *tomorrow*. Stupid brain.

For the record, it's #TMiP2019.

Umm.. wow! Haven't seen that in a while.
The bigger problem is: why didn't this PC boot into Linux?

@DigitalEd An @NclNumbas expert 😉

Forgot an image description: it's the windows 7 "startup repair" screen

@PaulsPrattle Not if you're a cool guy like me and pull the plug

@PaulsPrattle This is a campus managed PC, and I don't think it's even meant to have windows 7 on it.

@Shona_Mu well, yesterday our dog ate the baby's poo out of the potty while she was having her bum wiped, so it could be worse

Maybe e-assessment is a bad idea. Halfway through this resit exam, I can see that the vast majority of the students are still miles away from passing 😔

@eqdynamics It's supposed to dual boot

@eqdynamics this is a campus managed PC, it's working fine, I just accidentally let it boot into windows for the first time in ages

Eugh.... #TMiP2019

@DrSMJames @isaacphysics I didn't know you're going! You must be on the train after me

How is it colder in Peterborough than Newcastle?

I went the wrong way on the bus. Fortunately, turns out the route is a figure 8, so I'm back where I started and can just stay on.
#ThanksTopology #Thopology

Guess who doesn't get their name on the website

@icecolbeveridge @ajk_44 I was off math before I was cool

@d_yellowlees @stecks OK, you can have (1 - 0.9....) pounds from me any time you like.

@d_yellowlees @stecks OK, let's up the ante. You can have a thousand times as much as that.

Actually no, make it a BILLION times as much!

I've really enjoyed #TMiP2019, meeting fun maths people, and getting loads of ideas.

If you want to practise writing about maths or try out a maths comm idea, the @aperiodical is always open to you.
Get in touch at aperiodical.com/submit/ or email root@aperiodical.com.

@d_yellowlees @stecks It's still the same amount, so no, it's not very much

These houses could be in Newcastle, but they're not, they're in Cambridge.
I wish I knew an architectural historian who could tell me how housebuilding styles spread around the country.
Did architects travel around? Were there journals? Did everything come from London?

On a related note - pretentious names for housing developments. I thought the fad had subsided, but it seems to be alive and well here.
Near home there are ones called "Horizon" and "Opulence" (🤮)
Is it coming back? What's the fanciest one you've seen?

PS I'll take a "Quintessence" over pseudogeographical nonsense like "Charmington Mews" any day of the week

I've got a reputation for holding grudges. That's why they call me

@stecks Neon Sheep sells these and didn't call them utencils!

HOW IS PETERBOROUGH SO COLD???

@samholloway That seems to be the case!

Following very serious discussions with @stecks and @k_houston_math at #TMiP2019, I've made a calculator where you can change the order of operations and see what happens: checkmyworking.com/misc/samdob/

@BiggestTriangle @QualityStreetUK The symmetries of an equilateral triangle?

@OlafDoschke @stecks @k_houston_math Well, it doesn't do implicit multiplication, so what you really got was '4, 4' in the first case.
And it doesn't allow things to have the same precedence, because I can't think of a simple way of letting you specify that. Any ideas?

@OlafDoschke @stecks @k_houston_math Yeah, I wasn't sure if that'd be accessible to kids. I suppose it would

@OlafDoschke @stecks @k_houston_math It knows about prefix unary plus and minus

@OlafDoschke I need to write some text about how it works. I just wrote what you've seen on a train, and wanted to get it out. The idea is to think about what "order of operations" means. This is one interpretation

@katemath @TrueSciPhi @evelynjlamb @FryRsquared @mathbabedotorg @monsoon0 @EricaKlarreich @DrEugeniaCheng @extremefriday @math3ma @emilyriehl in the with-men list, I'm at a prime position, but I'm not in the list of actual mathematicians, apparently because I don't have a PhD 🤷

Of all the theorems, 0% of them can be written down, so why do we bother with maths?

Deep within this nest-o'-threads is the question: why do kids spend so much time on factorising quadratics?
Like, they've got to do *something*... twitter.com/HigherGeometer…

@extremefriday You were applying for tenure and you took time out to play in the Math-Off?!

@anildash I was on a train yesterday so had to make a thing on localhost instead of glitch. It was alright, I suppose...

Things are dire when you've stirred the tories of Whitley Lodge into action!
#StopTheCoup

@SheckyR @JimPropp "gen is nev und in its own tim" - Bil Wat

@math_doc_ron @Noah121Weiss @ProfNoodlearms @virtualcourtney can I get that on a t-shirt?

@samholloway @stecks @CoreMathsCat @MoMath1 @ajk_44 YES

I've just made myself cheese on toast, and now I'll have to live with the consequences.

Somebody in the Labour Party merchandise team needs a promotion

@mathforge @benjamin_leis I'm getting nothing at all, on mobile.

@estwebber You know what they say: dress for the title you want, not the title you have

Time to log off the internet and darn some socks: I just read a comment by a grown-up adult on a serious website saying that they were too young to remember the Spice Girls

@MBarany @KroneckerWallis If our interview had been a back and forth, rather than a one-shot, I would've pressed the on that. Happy to update the post if they give names!

@MBarany @KroneckerWallis Thank @stecks for that!

My one-year-old just did a brilliant rendition of the Hey Duggee theme, be a use I couldn't decode repeated shouts of "Bizzo!!!"
#SongsSpeakLouderThanWords