January

In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans The version I've seen most often involves algae or water lilies or something covering a pond

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All these apps offering to organise your monthly outgoings or show stats on your TV viewing habits have given me the idea to write an app to help you remember your mother's maiden name

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In reply to @amermathsoc

@amermathsoc @tpsemath @maanow @TheSIAMNews @AmstatNews @Profpatrice That link says "page not found" and I can't find it by searching for the title. Is there a direct URL?

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas First day back at work, and the email at the top of my inbox is from a student asking about "my statistics assessment", sent from their yahoo account. Who knows if they're even one of our students?

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In reply to @Shireling89

@Shireling89 @NclNumbas ahhh, those are the worst. Glad it wasn't serious!

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In reply to @Shireling89

@Shireling89 @NclNumbas I mean, many of these emails are sent as a consequence of them not remembering the stuff we're already trying to teach them in lectures, so I'm not sure teaching them email etiquette will eliminate this problem

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Is there a way to make it so that pressing Ctrl+Q doesn't close Firefox without so much as a confirmation prompt?
Ideally it would do nothing, because I never need to Entirely Leave The Internet in that much of a hurry

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway I've looked in about:config, and both those settings are set to true, I think from last time I had this problem. Weird!

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway ubuntu

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In reply to @JoatStewart

@JoatStewart Maybe making two decisions about the same problem is more decisive than just deciding on one course of action

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*doing a homework problem*
"Compute the determinant of (horrendous matrix)"
*determinant is -1*

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In reply to @heavymetalmaths

@heavymetalmaths I'd be happy to sit in a maths-related gather town all day, to be honest

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There's making a rounding error, and then there's rounding off to two decimal places after each step of the calculation. And a PhD student did this!

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In reply to @KarenCampe

@KarenCampe this situation involved exponentials. I'm quite concerned!

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In reply to @eqdynamics

@eqdynamics I've already got that set to true, and it still happens

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Is there a gpiozero-style Python package for sending gcode over a serial connection? I can find a lot of hacked-together scripts, but no nice reusable package so far.
Suppose @ben_nuttall is a good person to ask first. Any idea?

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In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK Happy birthday! Another year of successfully escaping youth

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston I voted "finite state machine" but my actual first thought was "is this one of those weird kink acronyms I have to be careful not to google?"

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This is simultaneously objectively rubbish and subjectively lovely.
My very first #plottertwitter

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For _reasons_, I want to know what the densest British coin is. I'm astonished that google doesn't already have the answer, but it does have this table.
Finally, a reason to use a spreadsheet!

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In reply to @christianp

So for reference, the 20p is the densest coin, with pretty much everything except 1p and 2p tied for second place.

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In reply to @bbarber_

@bbarber_ no, but my first guess is that the metal mix of the 50p is more hard-wearing, but too expensive for the 20p

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In reply to @lukejanicke

@lukejanicke I got an EleksDraw, a v v shonky alternative to the AxiDraw, but about 25% of the price.

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In reply to @Aldernero

@Aldernero @pentronik Next time you need this, MathJax has an SVG renderer, so probably has SVG versions of the fonts that you can use

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In reply to @pentronik

@pentronik @Aldernero Yeah, it might be best just to use MathJax itself to produce SVG files

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@ChronInvisSTEM Something similar recently started happening to my sternum. I didn't even know that was possible!

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I knew I chose the right day to be born twitter.com/snezanalawrenc…

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It's like they trained an AI to write my ideal arXiv preprint title twitter.com/mathHOb/status…

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In reply to @HigherGeometer

@HigherGeometer No thee and thou in this book from 1811, either. aperiodical.com/2013/05/all-sq…

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In reply to @HigherGeometer

@HigherGeometer and it's still in use in parts of Yorkshire today

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Today is my birthday! Please tell me fun maths facts

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In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall I'm in my semiprime for the third year running. It's touch-and-go whether that will happen again

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In reply to @FrancoKillTweet

@FrancoKillTweet Thanks, I love a bit of slack in my theorems!

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In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall

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In reply to @linguanumerate

@linguanumerate Homework! I love it!

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared Quantifiers! I love it!

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In reply to @evoluchico

@evoluchico @linguanumerate *gasping for breath*
I tried to get here as soon as I could, but my train left Newcastle at 10:37 and I had exactly the right change to buy a ticket 50% of the way but could buy a ticket for the whole journey in two different ways and

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In reply to @BarbaraFantechi

@BarbaraFantechi It's got my name in it! I love it!

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In reply to @ValerioCalvelli

@ValerioCalvelli @BarbaraFantechi mathb.in/48992

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@DBackstroem Satire! I love it!

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In reply to @rajenki

@RajenkiD @FrancoKillTweet nice!

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In reply to @abeliangrape_

@abeliangrape_ thanks! I've heard of that game but never tried to play it. And it's World Logic Day too, apparently

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In reply to @christianp

@abeliangrape_ and happy birthday to you!

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In reply to @blatherwick_sam

@blatherwick_sam An overambitious approximation! I love it!

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared @RobJLow @DavidB52s word on the street is Dirichlet's box has at least two pigeons in it, _if you know what I mean_

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge A base-agnostic fact! I love it!

And thanks for the card, too

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In reply to @MsJSteel

@MsJSteel I didn't know that! Thanks!

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In reply to @abeliangrape_

@abeliangrape_ it's also Gödel's death day and Tarski's birthday

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In reply to @aaronSG15

@aaronSG15 Magic! I love it!

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In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans I've been seriously considering a full enumeration of all the routes around our estate, one a day

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In reply to @chris_fairless

@chris_fairless are all these houses the same colour and that's the joke? Or are they different colours?

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Decided to compose a sea shanty:

My name's Aloisius
And my only wish is
That all of these dishes
Are full of fishes

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Today I'm doing a thing with social scientists where I'm supposed to make the case for doing teaching and learning online.
I know nothing about social science and I've had no time to prepare. I have no idea what I'm going to say!

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In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math the conceit is "should we keep doing this after lockdown?"

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In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math what aspects of online teaching have led to more and better conversations, in your experience? My impression, as not-a-teacher, was that everyone was struggling with engagement

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In reply to @christianp

Four pages into my draft notes: "but do I actually have anything to say?"

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In reply to @christianp

hmm, might as well use this Explain Everything subscription I accidentally paid for another month of

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In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths I bet there's a strong overlap with people who believe in the invisible hand of the market

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway is "Three Times Seven" by Doc Watson in the maths inspiration playlist? youtube.com/watch?v=tle4ET…

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway every time it comes on shuffle I think it'd be a great one for maths inspiration, then I can never remember if I've suggested it before

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In reply to @KangarooPhysics

@KangarooPhysics @alisonmartin57 @joshmillard @GerardWesty31 @crabbbaskets so is this a solution to the Icosian Game?

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I had a discussion last night with my mum about the warmth of my LED lightbulbs.
Apparently this is life in 2021 twitter.com/natluurtsema/s…

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In reply to @KangarooPhysics

@KangarooPhysics @alisonmartin57 @joshmillard @GerardWesty31 @crabbbaskets It's a out visiting each edge once, I think

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In reply to @KangarooPhysics

@KangarooPhysics @alisonmartin57 @joshmillard @GerardWesty31 @crabbbaskets Ah! I stand corrected

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This week I have answered @NclNumbas support emails from England, Wales, Ireland, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Australia and the USA.
Wow!

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Mathematicians, get ready: a new reference point for "how many holes does this have?" arguments is coming. twitter.com/designboom/sta…

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In reply to @christianp

Also mathematicians: finally, a real-world use for pairs of pants!

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In reply to @eleonorasfalcon

@eleonorasfalcon whaaaaaat?!

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In reply to @TeacherBowTie

@TeacherBowTie Ha!
A covid-era order of operations: Powers, Exponentials, eXponentials, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction

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I decided to plot the number of users, and number of items created, on the @NclNumbas editor at numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk.

See if you can spot when lots of people realised they needed to plan for online-only teaching!

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In reply to @nomad_penguin

@nomad_penguin @SeanMaths4EAL @mrbartonmaths random-people.glitch.me

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Excuse me for reading the first paragraph and assuming the investment in the north would be on the same order of magnitude as the one in the south
bbc.co.uk/news/business-…

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In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall @divbyzero That is glorious!

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney Strong approval from our no. 1 Moana fan

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In reply to @FrancoKillTweet

@FrancoKillTweet Correct!

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"I did everything I could to prepare dinner," I say, as the clock strikes midnight.

I make a mental note to check for ingredients in the fridge tomorrow.

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A few days into #plotter fiddling, this is the first thing that has really made me go wow!
#plottertwitter
(video alt: a pen plotter drawing a really intricate diagram)

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In reply to @christianp

Here's some of the other stuff it's drawn while I've been working out how to use it

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In reply to @baabbaash

@baabbaash A new paradigm in 3d printing photography.
Cat's paw >> @henryseg's finger

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A bar chart that is not a bar chart. Or is it?

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @RealityMinus3 Nice!

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In reply to @C_J_Smith

@C_J_Smith I love that wallpaper!

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In reply to @C_J_Smith

@C_J_Smith Ooh, that would wind me up

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It's a lovely book. twitter.com/evelynjlamb/st…

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In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge Clothoid: length always the same, angle changes at a constant rate

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron I had the same thought earlier when I was listening to a radio

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February

Back at work after a week off, 160 unread emails. One of the first ones I read referred to "Semester 3". What fresh hell is this?!

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths Did you do what I did, and on reading 'once every 200 years', scroll through your calendar app to find the previous and next years?

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In reply to @christianp

@standupmaths because there's no way that factoid was worth doing the quick maths to work the dates out without looking at a calendar

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In reply to @desdotdev

@desdotdev @standupmaths the leap year rule is more complicated: year N is a leap year if N is divisible by 400, or by 4 but not 100.

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett at that point, you need to ask what's the compressive strength of a numberblock?

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett On a related note, I thought recently about how @numberblocks could talk about infinity not being a number. If you had an infinitely big numberblock, you could maybe say where its feet are or where the symbol on top are, but not both at the same time. So not a numberblock, QED

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I've just published two @NclNumbas custom part types that I wrote for our coding theory module:
Codeword match numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/part_type/130/… and
and
List of codewords numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/part_type/131/…

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I'm going to be running some training for beginner @NclNumbas users at 14:00 GMT today. Register at numbas.org.uk/blog/2021/01/n…

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Just tripped and dislocated my shoulder for a few seconds. Ehlers-Danlos is no joke!

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In reply to @christianp

it hurts so much!

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I once saw a special effects supervisor called 'Nikolay Fartunkov' in the credits of a TV show.
Ever since, particularly thunderous coughs are met with the question "Are you Nikolay?" twitter.com/HaggardHawks/s…

20 favourites 8 retweets

In reply to @RectangleWorld

@RectangleWorld @pentronik @EMSL @abey79 I think youalso need the occult extension github.com/LoicGoulefert/…

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I think I got my plotter to draw a rainbow! #plottertwitter

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In reply to @becky_k_warren

@becky_k_warren Never seen one 🤷‍♂️

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In reply to @TimothyDaw

@TimothyDaw @Kit_Yates_Maths @DeliaOnline That is a brainwave!

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett I suppose you've ruled out some days in the recent past that you could have been infected. If every day has the same risk, then yes you're less likely then usual.
(this analysis brought to you by the League For Not Engaging With Bayesian Statistics)

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In reply to @Grallator

@Grallator @peterrowlett Should but won't

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I am not willing to be friends with anyone who says that calculating percentages is easy. twitter.com/DaveGorman/sta…

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In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge @monsoon0 @vihartvihart christianp.github.io/hexaflexagon/ can either take a photo from your webcam or an uploaded image, and stick it on a hexaflexagon

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In reply to @pkrautz

@pkrautz alternative to what?

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Geordies: do you say 'eesh'? Every time I say it I catch myself in case I'm accidentally revealing I technically grew up in Sunderland

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In reply to @der_flow_

@der_flow_ I bought an EleksDraw recently. I've got it working, but it's taken loads of work and the build quality isn't great.

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In reply to @artandtech

@artandtech @der_flow_ Eleksdraw, not eleksmaker. Main problem is that the rail for the pen holder was incredibly stiff, even after lubrication. I've stuck some weight on it to overcome friction, but that means it tips a bit when fully extended.
The screw thread on some of the plastic died quickly, too

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In reply to @christianp

@artandtech @der_flow_ It didn't come with a socket adaptor for the power supply, just the generic part, so I had to buy one. The assembly instructions are absolutely awful. Eventually found a YouTube video describing how the delivered kit differs from the one in the instructions

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway @alexbellos fab! If I haven't given you some feedback on that in a day or two, please remind me to read it!

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In reply to @christianp

@robeastaway @alexbellos I've read it and enjoyed it. The engagement x puzzliness space is a good one, which I'll try to bear in mind

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In reply to @christianp

@robeastaway @alexbellos There's a book by Smarandache called "Only questions, not solutions!"
I wonder if it would be good to write a puzzle book called "Only questions, not puzzles!" where you give the 'maths question' part like your simultaneous equations, and the game is to come up with the puzzle

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway @SparksMaths Gahh, that's exactly the wrong time of day for me!

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In reply to @TobyMeadows

@TobyMeadows Jeff Miller says 1907: jeff560.tripod.com/set.html

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In reply to @northumbriana

@northumbriana Ah, so does that explain the plane I saw approaching Newcastle Airport like it was dodging anti-aircraft fire today?

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The 3-year-old asked for a rainbow heart.
#plottertwitter

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In reply to @becky_k_warren

@becky_k_warren An EleksDraw. It's cheap and cheerful, and I've had to write a lot of code to make it do anything.

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In reply to @becky_k_warren

@becky_k_warren I've heard the axidraw is pretty much ready to go, but its expensive

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The names in this question were chosen by @NclNumbas at random, based on ONS data.

Teachers: how many of these names have you used before in questions you've set?

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In reply to @stem_wales

@stem_wales @NclNumbas full details at github.com/numbas/numbas-…
I got ONS data with first name and gender for everyone born in England and Wales 1996-2015.
It picks uniformly at random from that set (plus an arbitrary "no-gender" about 1 in 100 of the time)

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In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 @NclNumbas ooh, that's a good point - it doesn't have "pick a name starting with this letter"

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In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 @NclNumbas coincidence, I think!

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas for those who want names but not Numbas, here's a standalone name picker: random-people.glitch.me

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In reply to @drvinceknight

@drvinceknight Congratulations!

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In reply to @chris_fairless

@chris_fairless (young, born in England and Wales)

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In reply to @christianp

@chris_fairless (still using the first name assigned at birth)

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In reply to @soupie66

@soupie66 don't just use colour. In visual things you can use patterns as well (or instead), and in text you can give other information, e.g. instead of "the red circle" say "the red circle at the top-left"

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In reply to @christianp

@soupie66 don't change the colour of text to bring attention to things. The number of times I've missed important information because it's "highlighted" in red!

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In reply to @DrEugeniaCheng

@DrEugeniaCheng I've seen Indian students use these before, apparently earnestly. I also have a few very old textbooks that use them. @mathsjem might know roughly when they went out of fashion, if you're interested

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In reply to @henryseg

@henryseg You Really Must Understand Quaternions Sooner Or Later: The Puzzle

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas Following feedback from @Cshearer41 and some colleagues, I've updated the "random people" extension: it now represents non-binary people better, there are functions to pick people with a given initial or distinct initials, and it's easy to use a different country's data set

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas @Cshearer41 Here's a question that uses French data from @InseeFr: numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/question/89793…

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In reply to @NatalieBayfield

@NatalieBayfield @ch_nira @snezanalawrence @MelroseStewart1 @SophieBays I agree

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This question becomes more defensible when presented as a picture, and the time given on a clock.
I think the awkward fractions are a result of trying to find a work rate that's close to 2 hours per lawn, but produces fractions with small denominator. twitter.com/Dean_of_math/s…

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In reply to @hollykrieger

@hollykrieger this is like when Gödel found an inconsistency in the US constitution during his immigration hearing, but way more bland

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In reply to @christianp

@hollykrieger (I'm sorry you have to do this stupid test. I tried my best to vote in a way that would stop it happening)

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In reply to @blatherwick_sam

@blatherwick_sam

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In reply to @ESMathTeacher

@ESMathTeacher The only person I know who got engaged on valentine's day is now going through divorce proceedings, so...

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Today I have had a lovely time writing this @NclNumbas question about isomorphisms of a binary tree: numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/question/90020…

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl I'd say thank you for not saying "no it isn't!" again

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Nice! I give it ^vv out of ^vv

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas Today I have had a lovely time writing a @NclNumbas extension for graph theory.

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared I mean, it's highly unlikely to be my year 9 maths teacher, but that's all I'm getting

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In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK Based on the experiences of my cousin, who lives in a van down by the river, I reckon no

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Omg it draws TeX! #plottertwitter

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Idea: a theorem verifier with the mindset of a toddler. When it starts it rejects everything, so you have to show it the two theorems it already knows like a hundred times before it'll admit that some things are, in fact, true

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Can't not read it as "finitely generated abelian grape"

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Earlier this week I nearly set a group theory question "what's the minimum number of generators for a presentation of this group?" with an expected answer greater than 2, so I can sympathise with whoever wrote this prompt twitter.com/Kit_Yates_Math…

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In reply to @christianp

.. and now I've done a second's thinking and googling, the factoid I half-remembered only applies to finite simple groups.
Which the group in question was, so maybe I haven't made an error about my error?

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Me: ooh, maybe 1.5MB is too big for an entire package that students need to load to do their exam.

My employer: let's stick a different 1.6MB "hero image" at the top of each of our public-facing pages

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In reply to @matthen2

@matthen2 it says "could not find animation"

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Whoops, I put The Unthanks on and yet again I failed to prepare myself emotionally for Annachie Gordon

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In reply to @christianp

oh no, it's The Testimony of Patience Kershaw that regularly destroys me. The opening notes of Annachie Gordon are amazing, though

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In reply to @panlepan

@panlepan

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In reply to @christianp

@panlepan actually...

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In reply to @panlepan

@panlepan yeah, but I imagined moving a trapezium rather than a long triangle as my first step

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Putting the finishing touches to my history of mathematics in the north-east of England, "E to the Why Aye"

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In reply to @gregeganSF

@gregeganSF Worse: since there are more women than men, the median sperm count is already zero!

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Whoever works in the wilko warehouse didn't realise...

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In reply to @christianp

... they could have done this

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In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK @igavels !! My little one has been obsessed with My First Purim on cbeebies all day. I'll have to show her this tomorrow

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So obliging of my knee to dislocate in order to make space for my baggy trousers when I kneel.
#EhlersDanlos

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March

In reply to @kitwallace

@kitwallace @baabbaash Nice! I respect your patience implementing that algorithm in OpenSCAD. Have you tried SolidPython, which lets you do some work in python before getting OpenSCAD to do the CSG?

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In reply to @christianp

That's better: now the symbols don't look like the ghosts of overfull hboxes

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In reply to @ZoeLGriffiths

@ZoeLGriffiths Congratulations!

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In reply to @KarenCampe

@KarenCampe @benorlin @joemazur3 Yes, you have to interview him if you can. It's a really good book

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In reply to @benorlin

@benorlin If you want to do a whole episode about why there should be a unary division symbol, I'm available. But that's all I've got to talk about

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In reply to @christianp

@benorlin I would like you to promote the campaign to increase awareness of the Bengali currency symbol for "numerator one less than the denominator", ৸.

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In reply to @christianp

@benorlin and I also think it's important that you're aware of this experiment showing that Roman numerals are easier than place-value frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared sainsbury's gouda has got me through lockdown

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In reply to @benorlin

@benorlin Just this PDF with a proposal to add another Bengali currency symbol to unicode: std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/wg2/d…
I have a feeling I saw a web page about it once, but the symbol's main use now seems to be by Harry Potter fans, so Google isn't much use

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@benorlin I've found this pramukhime.com/blog/type-beng…

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In reply to @RobJLow

@RobJLow @katemath I suppose a hunch, a list of primes, and counting up in multiples of 13×53² from 1352999985012

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In reply to @RobJLow

@RobJLow @katemath I think the hunch is: if I pick two two-digit numbers a and b, there'll be a number with this property ab2cd, with c and d 4 or 5 digits. Then there are few enough choices of c and d to check by multiplying the lot out

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In reply to @aap03102

@aap03102 @Mr_BUFF_it @edsouthall @alonamit @FryRsquared @aperiodical @numberphile you mean I've n thinking about this number for days and I've literally already written a whole article about it?

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Just the number line
#plottertwitter

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WHAT IS THIS MADNESS??

Wikipedia says that in Croatia, decimal notation alternates between commas and dots for each power of 1000.

WHY

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In reply to @benorlin

@benorlin @MathAndCobb @dujella1 #TrillionaireProblems

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In reply to @benorlin

@benorlin @MathAndCobb @dujella1 youtube.com/watch?v=M_ZDRQ…

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In reply to @christianp

@benorlin @MathAndCobb @dujella1 in fact, 1 trillion Zimbabwean dollars is only 2 million quid, so it's possible somebody actually has this problem

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It's March, so time to start thinking about it: who's up for a #BigMathOff this year?

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In reply to @graveolens

@graveolens @FedericoArdila @hypergeometer There's also Shamos' Catalog of the Real Numbers euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty…

4 favourites 1 retweet

How many different prime numbers could a Premier league team's points total hit in one season?
Each team plays 38 matches. No points for a loss, 1 for a draw, 3 for a win.

4 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @PaddyMaths

@PaddyMaths @blatherwick_sam That's a whole different kettle of frogs!

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett Nice!

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You, a tech startup with millions in angel finance: made an app to turn handwritten maths into TeX.

Me, just the worst kind of smart alec: convinced a pen plotter to turn TeX into handwritten maths

#plottertwitter

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In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK @ChefclubNetwork WHYYYYYYYYY

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Hooray! I was just thinking about Geometry Daily yesterday. What a coincidence! twitter.com/Tilman/status/…

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In reply to @verytiredrobot

@verytiredrobot It's just MathJax, really - I get mathjax to lay out TeX in SVG, then replace each of its symbols with a single-stroke version I traced over the original.
I considered just doing a straight DVI to SVG conversion, but I only really want maths layout

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Adjusting the index for my new collection of essays appreciating obscure bits of maths, "Caring for the Squircle"

3 favourites 1 retweet

every time I try to use the onenote app on android, I get wound up because it doesn't have the "insert vertical blank space" tool

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I'm greatly enjoying following Doron Zeilberger's glee in this paper, arxiv.org/abs/1208.2258, via @PeterKagey, as he avoids using Taylor series, then radicals, then even subtraction, to prove a result in combinatorics

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In reply to @christianp

@PeterKagey he waves away operations like a sleight-of-hand magician vanishing your watch. It's a sight to behold

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In reply to @keenanisalive

@keenanisalive you might already know this, but just in case you don't, inkscape has the same thing, under "Path -> Outset". So you'll be able to find the code for that somewhere

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @peterrowlett Strong work

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I'd like it if my email client showed the number of threads with unread messages, instead of just the number of unread messages.

#MundaneWorkTweet

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In reply to @statto

@statto Is this about famous people having a public-facing page that anyone can follow, without having to be proper friends? Their relationships are sometimes interesting to their followers

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I've just seen someone using the symbol φ for the empty set.
I need to go and have a lie down.

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Similar to technical debt, the accumulation of technical problems over time due to more pressing concerns, I have a fun maths debt.
My current balance: five papers open in tabs on my desktop, twelve on my phone

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Have just discovered someone generating @NclNumbas questions using @racketlang. Can't yet see why.
More power to them, I suppose?

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In reply to @christianp

victorians: demonstrate refined sensibilities by falling gravely ill when presented with the wrong cutlery

me: six-week catatonic state brought on by overfull hbox

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In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans hey kyle your broadband's so slow I bet you don't even get the end of thi

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans Your broadband's so slow you play Bamboozle whole you wait for twitter to load

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In reply to @bbarber_

@bbarber_ @icecolbeveridge YES

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In reply to @merlin_nimue

@triviALGebraist YIKES

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In reply to @TheRandomMtrix

@TheRandomMtrix Yeah, I understand why it happened, and I've definitely done similar in the past

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Check this out: I'm about to make a fencepost error.
I need to evenly space six more planks between these two.
Tweeting this as proof that I at least had the thought. Will update you afterwards if I do the sums right

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

Well, I didn't make a fencepost error but I did claim 49÷7=6, so let's call it a draw

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@asycartoons Thanks for the cartoons!

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In reply to @FogleBird

@FogleBird Look at @alisonmartin57's stuff

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In reply to @Coni777

@Coni777 I'm always happy to see ⋛, "greater than, equal to, or less than". It looks redundant, but along with ⋚ it fills the same sort of role as ± and ∓, tracking branches with different signs

7 favourites 1 retweet

I hereby declare it Underappreciated Combinations of SI Units Day.

To start with, what could you justifiably measure in meganewtons per hectare?

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A beautiful coincidence, but I'd be very suspicious of anyone who gave me that measurement in those units twitter.com/Pecnut/status/…

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Nice! Though I think I'd measure that in giganewtons per hectare, unless it was a very shallow lake

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In reply to @christianp

A herd of cows coming in for milking.

A cow weighs about a tonne, or 1000kg, so a herd of 100 cows would apply a force of about 1 meganewton to the ground. When they're coming in for milking , I reckon they could all fit in a 100m×100m area, or a hectare.

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA *working out if I'd be happy to share a square metre with three other people*

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In reply to @miclugo

@miclugo there's a Randall Munroe comic about this somewhere, imagining a tube of fuel following the path of a car

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In reply to @christianp

What could you justify measuring in microgram-metres per second?

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Yes, fair point. I thought about that, and convinced myself pressing RT and like was enough to let you know I liked your suggestions, but I could've explicitly said something

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Cool. And for the bridge one, I think my conclusion is that I would be happy to share a square metre with three other people. At least, I think I've been on trains packed more tightly than that. I really did need to think about it!

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In reply to @MB_Whitworth

@MB_Whitworth Nice!

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared CRC: home of fascinating books that you'll never be able to afford. It almost guarantees that only people with access to uni libraries will ever read the stuff they publish.

This isn't advice that scales well, but if you want to learn about chip-firing, talk to @JimPropp

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In reply to @christianp

@honeypisquared @JimPropp have re-read your tweet, and maybe you already know about chip-firing. Whoops!

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared @JimPropp absolutely fair! The price is prohibitive

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I love that this project is still going twitter.com/l_incompletude…

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Have accidentally implemented the opposite of mastery assessment: the student must revisit every topic until they fail it.

Let me just switch that if statement the other way round...

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Here's something you can do without any calculation, assuming you've had the same realisation I've just had:

Write down a multiple of 2¹⁰⁰

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA the second thought is the one I had

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In reply to @christianp

I should have specified: write down a number as a sequence of digits

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Crikey, I just did a google search whose top hit was a usenet post from 1998!
I'm truly plumbing the depths of mathematical notation lore

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In reply to @christianp

it also produced this intriguing paper arxiv.org/abs/0907.0918

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In reply to @mrosvhs

@mrosvhs Can you easily write down its digits?

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In reply to @mathsgeek71

@mathsgeek71 if you want it to

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue I'll have to think about that. Can you do ternary without really thinking, after you've had some insight?

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In reply to @OLonguet

@OLonguet n'importe quel mesure entre 2,5 et 3,5 est un bon travail!

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REF, TEF, KEF - soon there'll be no more letters LEFt! twitter.com/UniofNewcastle…

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Digging holes is hard.

That is all I have (the energy) to say.

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You know how wise people put crosses through their handwritten 7s and 0s to differentiate them from 1s and Os?
Why don't we put a cross through a 6 so you can tell it apart from an upside down 9? Like ð but flipped

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A game for two players: you each pick a real number between in the interval [0,1]. Whoever picks the highest number wins. If you both pick the same, you go again.
Play three times. You can't pick the same number more than once.

Is there a strategy?

5 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @VinceVatter

@Vatter Yes, synchronously and in secret. Assume they can reveal any real number in finite time.

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In reply to @sarahlovesmaths

@sarahlovesmaths Picking 1 would win you the first round, but you can't pick it again in the other two

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge I'm just going to Basque in that pun for a bit

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Mathematicians: the first step in solving a problem is to write your problem out in the simplest terms you can.

Also mathematicians:

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In reply to @ShriramKMurthi

@ShriramKMurthi If there's a context where they make perfect sense, I'd love to know what it is. I *think* I can see the watermelon analogy in the first diagram, but it falls apart for the others

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Would anyone like to receive a mathematical postcard from me?

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In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall I'm currently stuck in a field

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @TheCRISPRGuy

@chkyourbrain DM me your address

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In reply to @soupie66

@soupie66 DM me your address

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In reply to @panlepan

@panlepan *

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In reply to @panlepan

@panlepan Yes, that's the one I was looking for!

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In reply to @christianp

OK, before this gets out of hand, I'll stop it here. I'll do my best to send a postcard to everyone who's asked so far.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle can you DM me your address?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 can you DM me your address?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ionicasmeets

@ionicasmeets can you DM me your address?

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In reply to @adil_3

@adil_3 can you DM me your address?

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In reply to @nthpijots

@nthpijots ooh, Australia might be a bit of a stretch. Would you accept a digital one?

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In reply to @9jamind

@9jamind can you DM me your address?

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In reply to @mathzorro

@mathzorro the USA might be a bit of stretch. Would you accept a digital one?

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Another example for make-it-rain-bloomberg.glitch.me twitter.com/BrotherKD/stat…

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Absolutely top stuff. I'd like to say I didn't tempt a global logistics crisis into existence with my tweet, but the facts are hard to argue with twitter.com/MB_Whitworth/s…

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall The answer is 1, in units of my choosing

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton can you DM me your address, please?

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@jenieuwedocent can you DM me your address please?

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In reply to @PennigUlrich

@PennigUlrich They turn out to be easier to make than I guessed. Can you DM me your address?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @pathhandwaving

@pathhandwaving can you DM me your address?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @davidoslive

@davidoslive can you DM me your address?

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In reply to @stecks

@stecks I won't stand for this milliard erasure

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I've been thinking about the best way to present a mathematical thought in a tweet. When I tweet a prompt or question, it's often hard for you to determine:
* do I have an answer in mind?
* do I believe there's a correct answer?
* is this a serious question?

7 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

...
* how much thought have I done about this so far?
* how much do I care about the answer?

4 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

For example, this recent question: twitter.com/christianp/sta…

The answer I had in mind was "no", if philosopher-kings are playing, but I was interested in whether you could ignore that and have a go at playing anyway.
I thought about it for a couple of minutes in the shower

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

I'm not sure if I should add something to this kind of tweet to let you know where I'm coming from.

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

I like how @jamestanton often tweets thought-provoking questions, and it's rarely clear if James knows the answer, or if there even is an answer. Sometimes it's a well-known theorem, other times something that just occurred to him.

6 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge @jamestanton Do you think that using #Puzzle would imply that I know the answer?

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @stecks

@stecks @OnlyConnectQuiz @VictoriaCoren @gheizhwinder @aPaulTaylor 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared This kind of pyramid, or... ?

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It's extremely on brand that the mathematical postcards I sent have all had "World Autism Week" printed on them in the postmark

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In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 Glad you like it! I sort of ran out of time to make it non-shoddy.

Anyway, I looked in Mathographics for ways of drawing eggs, and didn't find anything easy. I've just picked it up again and noticed the cover

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In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 It claims it's fancy, but the batteries gaffer taped to the pen holder as counterweights undermine that somewhat

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In reply to @LoveInner

@LoveInner @Cshearer41 that is just the equation of an ellipse: you've got pi/4 instead of x/4 in the exponential, so it's constant.
I also realised after putting the card in the postbox that it should be 5/4

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In reply to @ilarrosac

@ilarrosac @Cshearer41 Yes, I realised I had it the wrong way round after I'd posted the card!

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In reply to @MathsTechnology

@MathsTechnology @MEIMaths that salary!!! I'm in the wrong job

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In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans And here's that report: newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/nor…

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My new nickname for the toddler

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In reply to @christianp

(from this paper: arxiv.org/abs/2012.14513)

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In reply to @JavieRonquillo

@JavieRonquillo @mathhombre @rebin3 @WODBMath How would it work? You give it four images, it arranges them in a square under the text "Which one doesn't belong?"?

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April

Hello, @glitch! My 3-year-old wants to know if your fish have names

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner @JavieRonquillo yeah, I get that

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett good point about the aspect ratio. I've changed it to make it 16:9. We'll see if this is any better.

I have the same problem with the link in firefox on my desktop, but not on my phone.

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In reply to @glitch

@glitch She suggests Martha and Dee

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths Did you see the artisanal integers sites, back in the day?

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In reply to @DanielColquitt

@DanielColquitt Well done! I dug a much smaller border than that last year and I decided to quit gardening afterwards

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @nhoskee

@nhoskee @BernhardWerner @JavieRonquillo Now it's pointed out, I get that, but I'd have to delete the original tweet

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In reply to @christianp

My first tweet about this contained an example using pictures of humans. A couple of people rightly pointed out that that could lead to some unwanted reactions to the prompt, which I hadn't realised. I've deleted it, so here's another attempt

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I've made a tool for making "Which One Doesn't Belong?" pictures.

You can put text or pictures in each square, and change the colours of the background and text.

wodb-maker.glitch.me

#WODB

90 favourites 24 retweets

Truth is subjective.
The children think I've put a climbing frame in the garden.
From my perspective, I've increased the genus of my mowing surface.

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle A quarter, but I'd want the hot peri peri and a coleslaw side with it

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle OK. Drink refill while I'm up?

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It's a good thing the universe is eventually going to fizzle into nothingness, because otherwise someone would be born in a year that would take more than their entire lifetime to write down on the birth certificate, and that's no way to live

14 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @madebyburton @WhiteRoseMaths @rekenrek101 @aperiodical Can't remember if it's in the post, but once I bought the domain hotmathematicians.com so I could have the email address christian@hotmathematicians.com, and similar for anyone else who wanted one.
Wasn't committed enough to the bit to renew it after a year

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton @icecolbeveridge @WhiteRoseMaths @rekenrek101 @aperiodical Indeed

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In reply to @bethanyaus

@bethanyaus @hvhuizen62 @ionicasmeets You read from bottom to top. It baffled me for a while too

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In reply to @christianp

@bethanyaus @hvhuizen62 @ionicasmeets Although it looks like the i and j diagrams are the wrong way round. Oops!

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In reply to @jonathanavt

@jonathanavt @ionicasmeets The i and j diagrams are accidentally swapped, and you read from bottom to top. Does that help?

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In reply to @TedG

@TedG @aperiodical A few minutes

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In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths At least you didn't make the other classic mistake and microwave some metal

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In reply to @DrEugeniaCheng

@DrEugeniaCheng Same! My wife took our daughter into hospital yesterday for minor surgery, so I started packing her lots of tasty snacks. She said "I won't be able to eat, I'll be too worried."
We're similar in lots of ways, but that just didn't compute for me.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @heavymetalmaths

@heavymetalmaths @adil_3 🤔

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In reply to @christianp

I've updated my #wodb maker to prompt for image descriptions, and to show you suggested alt text for the final image.
Suggestions for a better format for the alt text are welcome!

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Is there a name for an acrostic, but each line starts with the same letter?
I just noticed I wrote one of those in a rather long email.

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In reply to @SamHartburn

@SamHartburn Lines from curves, digestive style!

3 favourites 1 retweet

I feel very dyspraxic today.
In the last fifteen minutes I banged my leg on the landing, spilled juice on the ceiling, and missed my mouth with the toothbrush.

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The international conference on e-assessment in mathematical sciences is taking place online 21st June to 2nd July this year.
It's free, the schedule is relaxed, and there will be some great talks.
Registration is now open: eams.ncl.ac.uk

2 favourites 4 retweets

Headline: "Covid: Younger Brazilians fall ill as cases explode"

I first read that as "Younger Brazilians explode as cases fall", which would be much worse!

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In reply to @Pecnut

@Pecnut @BlindMath @jeremybradley I didn't know you were in Durham, Adam!
Hello from very slightly further north, both of you.

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Who knew about this Roman numeral for ten thousand? ↂ
And apparently there's one for a hundred thousand too: ↈ

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I love it when I search for something really niche and someone's already made it.
Here's a dependency graph of the propositions in Euclid's Elements, drawn by @itsthomson
ocf.berkeley.edu/~thomson/eucli…

5 favourites 4 retweets

In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway I've had a lot of those over the last month or so. I hadn't been able to guess why they're doing it, but "from the same office" makes sense.
Do some big companies buy blocks of mobile numbers for company-provided phones?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans I was halfway through factorising 810 before I realised I'd misread the first one

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In reply to @soupie66

@soupie66 @MathematicsUCL yeah, there are a few more in Unicode, at least:

ↁ = 5,000
ↂ = 10,000
ↇ = 50,000
ↈ = 100,000

Whether those are the same as D and M is maybe up for debate

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett plot twist: the bookmark is a USB key containing thousands of digital books

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Here's a thing: while writing a document about decolonising our curriculum, Word's "Editor" feature popped up. It gave me a low spelling score because of...

all the foreign names it didn't know!

What a great example to include.

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In reply to @christianp

Dear Word,
"In formal writing, try spelling out the words" is unwanted advice. I rarely write formally.

Yours sincerely,
Christian Lawson-Perfect

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I remember seeing a map of the world (or just Europe?) showing the standard form of the equation of a straight line in different countries.
I can't think what to put into google to find it again. Can anyone help me?

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @ch_nira

@ch_nira is there a canonical version of your "Black Heroes of Mathematics" talk online anywhere? Or if not, where's the most recent recording?

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner not the one I can remember seeing, but I wouldn't be surprised if one is a knock-off of the other.
Which formula did you learn?

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In reply to @christianp

@BernhardWerner thank you for that link, by the way. How did you find it?

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In reply to @El_Timbre

@El_Timbre that's great, thanks!

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In reply to @christianp

@El_Timbre You might know this: has (y-y1) = m(x-x1) replaced y=mx+c in the national curriculum? If so, when did that happen?

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In reply to @El_Timbre

@El_Timbre Ah, so our maths undergrads would have learned the other form in maths a level, but someone with just GCSE would only have y=mx+c?
I'm surprised! The coordinate form seems much more useful

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In reply to @ch_nira

@ch_nira Thanks! That's what I thought was the most recent one

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson We have the same helmet! Helmet twins!

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Mathematical post from @ionicasmeets!
Bedankt voor de boekaanbeveling!

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In reply to @ionicasmeets

@ionicasmeets Well I've got to get it now!

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle Last digit probably 8. First digit probably 2. Check 40+16=56.

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Doing that thing where you play competitors in a circle of chess games against each other, but passing my uncle's football opinions to my brother-in-law, and vice versa

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In reply to @DrCaroSummers

@DrCaroSummers I'd love to know how much it's up to the whim of the individual writing the thousands of bits of text, and how much is intentional. Dutch duolingo really wanted me to know about turtles. Chinese is quite dry by comparison

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In reply to @TimHarford

@TimHarford @TimandraHarknes @BBCMoreOrLess Have you ever had @SophieBays on More Or Less? She loves Bayes' theorem more than anyone I've ever met. She gave a wonderful explanation of it as it relates to pregnancy tests when she won the #BigMathOff youtu.be/2-sz0f0Cdko

12 favourites 1 retweet

Cheeky little dodecahedron made out of a loo roll tube.

12 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @TobyBailey

@TobyBailey I like this a lot! I need to do more thinking about it when I'm not under a sleeping baby

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Current status: monkeys not in the barrel, but following a pretty pedestrian symmetry group

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @sasj_nl

@sasj_nl I like this one a lot!

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The baby has just expelled so much gas that I'm worried about his core temperature

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In reply to @Andrew_Taylor

@Andrew_Taylor @FryRsquared "Hey, kid! You needed an idea for your science project, right? Well, I need an innocent explanation for this lipstick on my shirt, so let's work together"

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"I listen to whatever's on the radio" : Decimal.
"Oh cool, you like this too": Binary.
"You might not have heard of it": Hexadecimal.
"I accompany her overtone singing with my hand-carved lute": HEPTAVINTIMAL

homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/ternary…

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @stecks

@stecks I got 3K problems but an unnecessarily obscure numbering scheme ain't one

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @DannyKodicek @RobJLow @futurebird "although a definition cannot be false, it may be improper" books.google.co.uk/books?id=kQ8bA…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @mscroggs Phonics makes me so cross! Never mind that that's not how English spelling works, what about all the northern vowel sounds?

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It's just been autism awareness month and apparently tomorrow is the start of Ehlers-Danlos awareness month. If I keep getting diagnoses, you can be aware of me all year round!

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May

In reply to @MBarany

@MBarany @icm2022 @aperiodical Daud Mamiy says that boycotting has never been an effective way to solve problems. The boycott of apartheid South African sport was effective.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo I bet @jjsanderson has a list

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Why did google call their AI department DeepMind when "The Wisdom of the Cloud" was, and remains, available?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle @mrsdenyer I have a pentagon picture for you! Would you like it now or on a postcard?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle @mrsdenyer Here you go!

*Alison voice*: What do you notice? What do you wonder?

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway @SparksMaths given it's a Chinese rocket, it's Sino-soidal

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @DanielColquitt

@DanielColquitt Bad back club!
My back has decided it doesn't want to help the baby learn to walk any more. So now he can walk more easily than I can.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @henryseg

@henryseg What a good video!

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I chant integer sequences as lullabies. Soporific for baby, brain exercise for me.
Here's a sequence that I came up with for this afternoon's nap:

1,2,3,2,4,5,4,6,4,7,6,4,8,9,8,10,8,11,10,8,12,8,13,12,8,14,12,8,15,14,12,8,16,17,16,18,16,19,18,16,20,16,21,20,16…

What's next?

9 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @ZoeLGriffiths

@ZoeLGriffiths Go for it! Mrs L-P taught me a good one:
(Let CDD stand for 'cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo')

Let's count back in 1s from 10,
CDD
10,9,8,7
CDD
6,5,4,3
CDD
2 and 1 and don't forget the zero!
CDD

(Repeat for 2s from 20, etc)

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @stem_wales

@stem_wales already in progress, thank you

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ZoeLGriffiths

@ZoeLGriffiths When I'm in charge the green bottles fall off in Zeckendorf numbers.
The three-year-old is completely uninterested in maths and can't count past 15, so it's a solitary pursuit

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @stem_wales

@stem_wales yeah, I saw that, and wasn't surprised to see Nim turn up given the rule behind my sequence, but it diverges quite early

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @nicole_cozens

@nicole_cozens I agree!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Andrew_Taylor

@Andrew_Taylor I've definitely considered doing this in the past, where I don't want a break between cases so an if/else wouldn't do

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA This catches out so many first-time @NclNumbas question writers!
I wonder if I can get it to spot when this situation happens and suggest the right kind of feedback.
Which system does your bridging course use?

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @NclNumbas Ah, thanks

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In reply to @christianp

This sequence is now in the OEIS: oeis.org/A343934
(spoilers!)

2 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @PeterKagey

@PeterKagey Thanks! I was also surprised.
It's nice, but is it keyword:nice? (probably not)

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In reply to @stecks

@stecks Please let me see!

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Of all the attempts the three year old just made at saying 'Northumberland', I like 'All Thunder Land' the best.

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway I've just found out that the one near Spennymoor has closed, leaving none in the north-east. End of an era!

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In reply to @stevenstrogatz

@stevenstrogatz @ATT app updates?

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Adventures in #EDS: found a comfortable place to put my leg

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Write the digit 1 eight million, one hundred and seventy seven thousand, two hundred and seven times in a row.

That's a prime number.

Discovered by Ryan Propper and Serge Batalov a few days ago. oeis.org/A004023

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In reply to @lukejanicke

@lukejanicke You might want to sit down. I've got some bad news about 2

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In reply to @El_Timbre

@El_Timbre @icecolbeveridge lovely stuff!

Here's a technical thing: could you add the slide content as image elements, instead of background images, so that you can add alternative text for screen readers?

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Big respect to whoever made the map for this old quarry look like a ghosty face

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway oh wow, I hadn't realised that the Broadway in tynemouth is the same road as Wallsend high street!

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@katemath @alisonkiddle I sometimes catch myself switching between the two during the same number, and I can't work out why

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In reply to @blatherwick_sam

@blatherwick_sam how many times have you sneezed?

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I've worked out how to write an Elm app on @glitch!
Here's a minimal example: elm-lang.glitch.me

And here's a more complicated app: gaussian-origami.glitch.me

9 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA I love these! Such a good idea

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Found a new integer sequence but it looks so stupid I don't think I'll submit it

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge "Is it an anecdote?"
"Is it a coincidence?"
"No! It's N=1 Man!"

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π can stand for a variety of things in maths, but is 3.14159... the only constant it's conventionally used for?

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In reply to @christianp

and the same question, but for e

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In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall My first go at that tweet asked "is that all it can be used for", but I stared at it for a while before changing to "is conventionally used for", and your reply is why

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In reply to @GoranNewsum

@GoranNewsum yes, that's something I'm also interested in at the moment: different names for the same thing

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In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall For constants?

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In reply to @njj4

@njj4 none of those are constants though, right? In the sense that if we're both doing topology, my π might not be the same projection map as your π

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In reply to @Mat_Hunt

@Mat_Hunt thanks!

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In reply to @christianp

I'm also interested in any non-number constants with conventional names that you're aware of. At the moment I've only got ∅, for the empty set, and e for the identity permutation

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In reply to @christianp

ooh! i, j and k basis vectors!

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue it does for my purposes, and is in fact the example that prompted this train of thought

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In reply to @virtualcourtney

@virtualcourtney that stretches my understanding of what a constant is, but it's in the same sort of area, isn't it?

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In reply to @mattmcirvin

@mattmcirvin thanks for these! I guessed that physics would have a lot of constants, but I wasn't aware of any non-number ones. I'll go and look those up

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In reply to @mattmcirvin

@mattmcirvin I'd be more inclined to call the Kronecker delta a function

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In reply to @sarahlovesmaths

@sarahlovesmaths yeah, I'll take the named number sets.
I is tricky: you need a bit of context to say what dimension it lives in, unless you define matrix multiplication more expansively than the usual textbook definition

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In reply to @christianp

@sarahlovesmaths and I wonder if there's a list somewhere of all the different conventions for the standard basis vectors

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In reply to @sarahlovesmaths

@sarahlovesmaths how have I not watched that yet!

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In reply to @christianp

Complete graphs! K₅ etc

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In reply to @odedude

@odedude but those are both variables, right?

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle @edsouthall This morning my daughter asked me "why have you got so old?" as if it was a conscious tactic on my part

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In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall yes, I've always had to go to the website. I think the app says somewhere it only takes PCR tests

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Time for another round of "when is it OK to omit the multiplication symbol?"

I think for powers of numbers, it's fine to omit, e.g.

2²3² = 36.

What about subscripts, for the number base, e.g.

12₅23₅ = 331₅,

or do I need a multiplication symbol:

12₅ × 23₅ = 331₅.

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In reply to @christianp

Or, less esoterically, when I've got a subscripted variable followed by a number, e.g.

x₂4

(I will not accept "put the 4 first" as an answer)

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron I think one reason this is worth noting is that it's easier for one huge company to take action to reduce plastic use than for thousands of small companies to coordinate

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In reply to @gregor_latimer

@LatimerGregor @jjaron Or, it's easier for 20 huge companies to resist regulation than millions of small ones

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In reply to @csgillespie

@csgillespie @Rbloggers that seems to be the whole rmarkdown source of the post, in the og:description tag. So does that mean it expected the RSS feed it came from to only have a short description?

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Tweeting this because I want to do it but don't have time, and I want someone to pester me about it in a few weeks' time:

I'd like to start a collection of mathematical notation ambiguities, inconsistencies, and unpleasantness. It'd be a wiki, or at least collaboratively edited

20 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @mathsjem well, I suppose they've both got alphas and betas?

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @pkrautz

@pkrautz @zorkow I bet!

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In reply to @BlindMath

@BlindMath @chadtopaz It does! Too many of our casualised teaching staff are only employed for term time. They officially have a right to be converted to permanent after four years, but often they're coincidentally sacked just before that happens

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In reply to @Ayliean

@Ayliean @soupie66 A what where now

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In reply to @Ayliean

@Ayliean @soupie66 Ahhhhhhh

Well done

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One of the terrible laws in this article requires "schools to notify parents if sexual orientation or gender identity are going to be mentioned in class".

Supposing this law stays on the books long enough, someone is going to learn about LGBTQ+ issues from the mandatory warning. twitter.com/girldrawsghost…

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In reply to @zorkow

@zorkow @pkrautz indeed

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Writing another chapter of my memoir, "I tried to do the maths, and now here we are"

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In reply to @HigherGeometer

@HigherGeometer @rob_cope_c Well, I think you should definitely talk to more people about maths.
I'm still sad about those interviews. I did one with @JimPropp that was unusable, and I would have really like to do more. One day!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @C_J_Smith

@C_J_Smith The number of times my sole contribution to a meeting is "Can we actually write that down somewhere though?"

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I've just found some time to listen to @ch_nira's Life Scientific (bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…)
"You don't need anybody's permission to be a mathematician" is a slogan for the ages

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Hey @NCLMathsStats do we run a functional analysis seminar called "f∘g on the Tyne", and if not why not?

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Is this Simpson's paradox? twitter.com/JanvierUK/stat…

5 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway A sum is just an average multiplied by n 😋

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In reply to @xmau

@xmau @robeastaway Correct

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I want to be one of those people who gathers their thoughts on twitter, sharing wisdom from their areas of expertise.

Instead, I'm answering tech support emails and gobbling peanuts to regain energy lost since the baby woke up at 04:30

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo @edsouthall @jfb_smoggy it is in Sunderland!

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo @edsouthall @jfb_smoggy despite living here my whole life, I'm not great at the accent!
Trying to sound it out in my head, I _think_ the verb would be less likely to be two syllables. I'd have to find a more authentic mackem to check, though

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In reply to @jfb_smoggy

@jfb_smoggy @ColinTheMathmo @edsouthall a diphtong, I think, but yes

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In reply to @christianp

@jfb_smoggy @ColinTheMathmo @edsouthall how does it sound on Teesside?

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I'd been trying to relate this to my work and not really getting it, but just now I got an email from a colleague.
Whenever a student asks for help, or I suggest a change, this person refers to class-wide summary stats as evidence that there's no problem to fix.
INCORRECT twitter.com/pwr2dppl/statu…

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This is the year Clever Hans gets his due, I'm sure of it twitter.com/abel_prize/sta…

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In reply to @plusmathsorg

@plusmathsorg "multiplectic extension" sounds like something I'd need to go for a physio for, so my vote is for Parallel Transport

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A lot of my interaction with colleagues this year has been saying "are you _sure_ you want to make this 1 hour test available for exactly 1 hour?" and then punching a wall when they say "yes" twitter.com/jroboakley/sta…

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared This has to lead to a better name for the pigeonhole principle. But what...

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In reply to @christianp

I suppose I should also give the more positive experience that many colleagues have shown empathy with the situation the students are in, and gone to great lengths to allow extra time and used their discretion.
On those occasions I high-five the wall.

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Looking into arranging some accessibility testing. One company: the only way of initiating contact with them is by phone.

That's pretty inaccessible!

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In reply to @adil_3

@adil_3 I don't feel like I perceived each of the spans of time accurately - I'm not sure if I would have been able to say the houses bit was one third the length of the pastures bit without being told, for example.

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In reply to @Cyberplasm

@Cyberplasm @NclNumbas I assume that my empty inbox means it went OK?

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In reply to @HigherGeometer

@HigherGeometer How I imagine Lean feels

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In reply to @modeltheorist

@modeltheorist Yiiiiiiikes!
Sad time for both you and the snake

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson Eep!

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A good article on BBC news about dyspraxia bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan…

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June

Today in dysautonomia: had to abort my shower because I couldn't stand up long enough

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In reply to @MarcusduSautoy

@MarcusduSautoy but marcus they're so annoying

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In reply to @christianp

I tweet things like this because the ways in which I'm disabled are all pretty much invisible, and I think it's important to know that healthy-looking people live with these sorts of problems.

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In reply to @christianp

I usually include a medical name for the condition I think is most relevant because otherwise "I couldn't stand up long enough" might be interpreted as "I had a big sesh last night" or something else that I could mitigate.

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In reply to @christianp

But it's tricky, because I've been diagnosed with like a dozen things that overlap with each other in many ways, and nobody seems to understand what they really are, or what causes them.

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In reply to @christianp

So today is it dysautonomia, or dyspraxia, or Ehlers-Danlos?
I'm fairly sure it wasn't colourblindness, at least!
I don't really like having this long list of really rare things - it looks implausible. But they all overlap, so P(dysautonomia | dyspraxia) is pretty big, I think

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Thanks! Glad it's not just me

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In reply to @christianp

@icecolbeveridge ooh, the game is coming up to 3 million attempts!

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In reply to @christianp

Update: I mowed the lawn. My autonomic system is a land of contrasts 🤷

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In reply to @MrChapmanMaths

@MrChapmanMaths @icecolbeveridge Fab! If I was ofsted I'd rate you outstanding.
Yes, there's data: aperiodical.com/2016/05/are-yo…
57 is the second most common mistake, after 51

3 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @GreyAlien

@GreyAlien I realised recently that I will be 80 in 2066, and I bet someone asks me what William the Conqueror was like

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Teachers don't want you to learn this trick!!!

To get 99% of something, first increase it by 10%, then decrease it by 10%.

It really works!!!!!

26 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney @AffinityWater I'm so glad you've written a song about this! The struggle is real!

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney @AffinityWater The one time I dared ask if there's any way of working out, I got a torrent of answers that it's obvious.

Unfortunately for me, for some people it's obvious that size of button corresponds to size of deposit, while for others it's obviously frequency of use

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney @AffinityWater my mum has that one! If the tiny button worked, it would be strong evidence in favour of the frequency-of-use argument.

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Is 'ghost' @github's insensitive way of referring to a deactivated user, or is the person who assigned this issue really dead?

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In reply to @christianp

@github asking because I recently found out a cool person I'd had some work interactions with died suddenly a few months ago, and I don't want that to have happened again

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney @scottkeir @jjsanderson @AffinityWater @chellaquint this is how Demolition Man starts, isn't it?

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Asked to sign a petition asking the @UniofNewcastle to divest from companies involved in the arms trade, I start wondering about the massive statue of Lord Armstrong outside the Hancock museum

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This thread is incredible. Can't imagine any age when I would have had the patience to solve, or set, these puzzles twitter.com/HedgeProtestin…

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As part of running @NclNumbas at Newcastle, we get copies of students' accommodations, as agreed with the disability office.
So many of them just say "extra time in exams", when I'm sure the students would have much more specific ideas if asked directly twitter.com/sos_writing/st…

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas I don't think we have a bad disability office. But I do think we could be doing more to establish what would particularly help students for each assessment method.

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I've just merged branches from the past year's development work on @NclNumbas together.
Incredilbly, all the tests pass!

Going for a victory lap, Jonathan Edwards style

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In reply to @DeathCab4Callie

@DeathCab4Callie My experience as a disabled student was that most lecturers were happy to go along with what the disability office said, but a couple insisted it would compromise their teaching style. In effect this excluded me from their courses.

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In reply to @christianp

@DeathCab4Callie As a staff member, I advocate for students when I know what they need, but the information we get from the disability office is so minimal and written only with standard assessment methods in mind.

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo Is this why when I talk about maths, instead of "it's obvious that...", I say "because I'm a great and powerful wizard, I know that ..."?

4 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway I'd say "my wife has sung there", but that doesn't narrow it down much

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA I hate this feature so much! You're bang on that it causes more problems than it solves

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @aperiodical First one

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths I assume you've already seen this playlist of covers played on calculators? youtube.com/playlist?list=…

1 favourite 0 retweets

Mundane tech tweet for anyone it might help:
I just updated my laptop to Ubuntu 21.04 and multitouch gestures stopped working. Apparently it's because it now uses Wayland, whatever that is.
I got them working again by installing this Gnome Shell extension: extensions.gnome.org/extension/1253…

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson It seems fine to me, except it seems to have decided that it can't do four finger gestures. I'm sure eventually that will annoy me enough to see if there's a config file I can change

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In reply to @msmathcomp

@msmathcomputer2 @Zoom No!!! That's very important information. Thank you

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"only 60 percent of the top 10"
There's another way of saying that

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl Natural resonant frequency of deductions?

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In reply to @MathHistFacts

@MathHistFacts @aperiodical ahh yeesh, this is what I get for not checking references. It was Édouard Lucas!
At least this gives me a chance to fix the headline that doesn't work if you say Euler properly

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In reply to @northumbriana

@northumbriana Ethelbert must have been one bad dude to not get made a saint after eight in a row!

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I've spent another couple of hours playing with Lean, following @XenaProject's Formalising Mathematics course (github.com/ImperialColleg…)
I think the hardest part for me is remembering what each notation really represents, like ¬ P is really (P → false)

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA @XenaProject I like it, but I have to remember it!

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett Well remembered! Yes, too soon

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron that was exactly my attitude. A little bit risky, though!

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Charles Babbage fact: the What's the Difference Engine, designed during his blue period, accepts input represented by the positions of brass cogs.
On turning a crank, the machine emits a protracted sighing noise. There is no other output.

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Is that a teeny tiny bit of eclipse?

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In reply to @christianp

One of the reasons I'm not a physicist: not motivated to go to any more effort to improve this, or even think about how it works. I'm satisfied there is in fact an eclipse happening.

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In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs Thank you for your service

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In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK Correct. Abort as soon as you can!

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This game about prime numbers with a suspiciously familiar mechanic is part of the indie bundle for Palestinian aid on itch: gocreatefun.itch.io/2-3-5-7

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Ooh, it's been a while since someone Doctored me. Another one in the file for my PhD-by-reputation submission.

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett I'll swap you

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This makes me wonder: has anyone ever tried setting up these fear-inducing diagrams in, like, a kids' soft play, to see if they work? twitter.com/CorgiHell/stat…

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge unique colours on football strips?

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl That's why I quit my PhD!

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I'm watching Twirlywoos and I recognised a location that was also used in Teletubbies and I don't need this information

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I've had a couple of days off work because I was BURNT. OUT.

For some reason, I've remade my old wordsearch generator in Elm, using @glitch. Once I worked out how to use elm reactor to show the nice compilation errors, it was a lovely experience!

wordsearch-generator.glitch.me

4 favourites 0 retweets

.@ForumBooks our three-year-old has just asked, moments before falling asleep, "How did our Earth get made? Let's go to that new book shop and see if they have a book about it".
So, before we pop round tomorrow: do you? Thanks in advance!

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ForumBooks

@ForumBooks Thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA It's foundational concepts all the way up

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron is this one of those vacuous truth situations? Does the Russian representative know that secure quantum communication is impossible?

2 favourites 0 retweets

@chadtopaz so you're saying you drank bad coffee today?

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @howie_hua Hi David and Howie! Is it OK with you both if I put a screenshot of these two tweets in a talk I'm doing tomorrow? Need to record it today, so if I don't hear back in the next couple of hours I won't use it. No problem if not.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @howie_hua Yeah, I thought it was unlikely I'd get you both! Thanks anyway

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @howie_hua Well, I recorded it in one take, so that's a bonus. Will find out tomorrow what the reaction is. Thanks for asking!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@DavidKButlerUoA @howie_hua In case either of you want to see: my slides, including your tweets, are online at numbas.org.uk/talks/diagnost…. The video is at youtube.com/watch?v=lBgO-r….

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Coni777

@Coni777 @TryEraser That seems like an important omission!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @virtualcourtney

@virtualcourtney @divbyzero yeah, it has a real "black, asian, normal!" vibe

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK One of my colleagues habitually writes dates like "the 26'th of July". It drives me mad!

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𓁰

U+13070 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH FIRST TIME DOING STANDUP COMEDY

13 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson Or, it's just started working

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I've made a game where you're shown a random unicode character and have to guess its name.

unicode-guessing-game.glitch.me

I used @elmlang on @glitch.

25 favourites 5 retweets

In reply to @cs_kaplan

@cs_kaplan @elmlang @glitch I don't think so. There isn't a direct method, and I'm wary of doing something like trying to display it and measure against something I know will be displayed as a box.
Weirdly, my android phone which should use Google's Noto font displays far fewer characters than my Ubuntu PC

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@cs_kaplan @elmlang @glitch So I suppose its a team game, with you and your browser against the Unicode consortium

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @cs_kaplan

@cs_kaplan @elmlang @glitch Well, I reckon the GNU unifont (unifoundry.com/unifont/index.…) would do it, but I like seeing what characters I'm missing

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @CardColm

@CardColm Aahhhh that's just reminded me I forgot to marinade my pork for tonight!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK so how did it go?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees I saw this and I thought of you: whatismote.com
Have you seen it before?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @cs_kaplan

@cs_kaplan @benjymous @elmlang @glitch The fact that they display on my PC suggests that I can put together a webfont to make them work for everyone.
But is this how I should use my time? 🤔

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees Not yet

1 favourite 0 retweets

Sometimes I feel like the opposite of superman, an alien from a considerably more hospitable planet.

"You'll never defeat me, hEDS!"

(moments later)

"Earth gravity... one of my many weaknesses..."

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA Talk more slowly
(I am serious)

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @DanielColquitt

@DanielColquitt how's your glibc?

1 favourite 0 retweets

So *that's* what the Yoneda lemma means! twitter.com/math3ma/status…

3 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett Mr Lawson-Perfect would just like to say that he is *this* close to a month and a half of annual leave

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett 🤷

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc ah rats, past CLP's plan to peer pressure me has succeeded!

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Well, I'm now the owner of whystartat.xyz.

9 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge this site has existed for twelve seconds and you claim there's a community?!

(Thanks for joining in! I will look now)

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Oh crikey, I've just noticed that I made this survey on mixed fractions five years ago and never looked at the results!
aperiodical.com/2016/09/do-you…
362 responses at the moment. I should do some analysis!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc aha! That's the entry from the Edinburgh Encyclopedia that I'd linked, but transcribed! Thanks!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs I've done that. I can't see a page in the mediawiki docs explaining what each of the built-in extensions does, which I'm surprised by

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @dginev

@dginev that would be really helpful, thanks! Could you stick it in a new page on the wiki, and we'll draw from it?

0 favourites 0 retweets

July

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Back of the class, Beveridge

2 favourites 0 retweets

I defined a function called 'mm' in my bash session, and that seems to have been a bad move because now when I use the mousewheel it writes a load of junk instead of scrolling!

#TodayILearned, I suppose

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle That puzzle that's often called "Einstein's puzzle", where you have to work out who lives where, given statements like "X lives next to Y"

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK I think this is a P(A|B) ≠ P(B|A) situation

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge we've been doing the countries in Africa each morning. Second-littlest L-P wakes up the people next door shouting "DJIBOUTIIII!!"

1 favourite 0 retweets

I've spent the morning filling up whystartat.xyz

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle has anyone said Fibonacci numbers?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @SparksMaths

@SparksMaths Yes please!

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths

2 favourites 0 retweets

Never mind just reporting on a third derivative, this article is reporting on a derivative of a probability of a second derivative: bbc.co.uk/news/business-…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Got to use the word 'radicand'. I'm definitely helping.

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @SparksMaths

@SparksMaths Thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @SparksMaths

@SparksMaths I'm trying to decide on that myself at the moment

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In reply to @FeralMathPhysic

@FeralMathPhysic \( and \) for inline, \[ and \] for display mode

Thanks in advance for your contribution!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @wikiteq

@wikiteq @mscroggs Thanks!

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl @joshuagrochow @chadtopaz Have you seen the "I can name your polynomial" party trick? (pick the party carefully)
somethingorotherwhatever.com/name-your-poly…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @pwr2dppl I'd like to repeat what David says, and also this has reminded me I'd been meaning to say to both of you: it boggles my mind how you can think hard about something and maintain the presence of mind to tweet about it

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl @DavidKButlerUoA Right, well, thinking at all then! I think my mind works differently to yours, and it's interesting to see, so thank you for sharing it

2 favourites 0 retweets

Wanted: a compilation video showing what 1mm/h, 2mm/h, etc rain looks like.

9 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @SeanMaths4EAL

@SeanMaths4EAL @ColinTheMathmo Yeah, it feels like there should be a different unit for measuring rainfall. This is like measuring fuel economy in m^2

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @CounterOfSheep

@CounterOfSheep I have the same thoughts. I'm _fairly_ happy with describing myself as disabled now, but whenever I think it might come up I have this long internal dialogue about how I'll explain myself.
Invisible disability is hard!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK @RNJ3007 Cor!

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In reply to @KarenCampe

@KarenCampe @Mathgarden I have a paperback copy of that. It's so good!

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl This is going in whystartat.xyz

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I lasted two days before getting sidetracked into adding my "write maths, see maths" code to the mediawiki editor so I can see how my LaTeX will be rendered before pressing "Preview".

(I don't like pressing Preview)

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl Whaaaat, the art one too?! Rats

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs nice example! whystartat.xyz/index.php?titl…

1 favourite 0 retweets

Mathematicians: variables are named using Latin, Greek, Fraktur, Hebrew and Linear B letters in bold, italic, script, sans-serif and serif forms.

Also mathematicians: I need some brackets. Guess I'll use good ol' parentheses again! 😎

whystartat.xyz/wiki/Parenthes…

7 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 @KarenCampe @danicquinn Needs smiley faces

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 @KarenCampe @danicquinn You're right, I should have done it like this

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @KarenCampe

@KarenCampe ah, great! Thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 @KarenCampe @danicquinn Kinds of triangle: equilateral, scalene, just happy to be here

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths You're wrong, Matt, but the word that is tha maximum amount of fun to type is currently my password, so I won't be telling you what it is

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Here's a question: is it OK to omit parentheses around the argument to a non-standard function?

Like, "sin x = sin(x)" and "log z = log(z)" are common, but what about "f x = f(x)"?

Does the function name need to be more than one letter?

"flop x = flop(x)"

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner what do you mean by linear? I wouldn't say sin and log are linear.

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner Aha!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl I can forward you some heated arguments for both sides of this question that I've received, if you want to lose the will to ever think about it again

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @GoranNewsum

@GoranNewsum Interesting! Can you remember which subjects?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @dginev

@dginev That's excellent work, thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@dginev How did you find these? Looking through a few of them, I haven't found one yet where f is a function, and "f x" can only mean "the application of the function f to x".

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @dginev

@dginev Ooh, that one looks good, thanks

1 favourite 0 retweets

Why is there no mathematical italic small h in unicode? The rest of the alphabet is there! This is madness

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@FakeUnicode what's the deal? There's a bold italic small h, and even a bold sans-serif italic small h, but no plain old italic small h!
There's a free codepoint for it between g and i, so WHAT'S THE UNICODE CONSORTIUM TRYING TO HIDE?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jontix

@jontix no, that's specifically sans-serif. There are implicitly serif 𝑔 and 𝑖 at U+1D454 and U+1D456, respectively

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston I spotted that, but it doesn't look the same as the other mathematical italics in my default font. So maybe that's a problem with my font.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@robinhouston I'm sure the unicode people have had this argument millions of times, but this feels to me like the problem with having a mix of characters named for their meaning and characters named for their appearance

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston Yeah. I expect a screen reader would read out "planck constant" though, which is no good if I mean something else

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @benorlin

@benorlin I like it. Nobody notices how quiet it is in the newsroom whenever there's an emergency

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston you're right: "Arimo" has ℎ but it uses "Latin Modern Math" for the rest of them, and forcing Latin Modern Math gets a matching ℎ

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @FakeUnicode

@FakeUnicode Thanks! Is there a list of codepoints that you'd expect to see, but exist somewhere else?

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@chadtopaz @pwr2dppl You're folding apples over there?

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ch_nira

@ch_nira @royalsociety @IMAmaths @SophieBays @sambrownfox @YouthSTEMM @hanat_akordor NIRA THAT HOODIE!!!!! 🤩

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Plot twist: you were holding the laser

0 favourites 0 retweets

NHS email: "Most children around this age speak in sentences of 4-6 words"

My daughter: "as soon as I've sorted these eggs I'll come over and eat my breakfast"

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In reply to @benorlin

@benorlin A class of kids on a day trip wandering around aimlessly

1 favourite 0 retweets

Thanks to everyone who's written something on WhyStartAt.xyz so far.

I'm gathering ideas and some questions about how the site should be organised, at whystartat.xyz/wiki/Whystarta…

Please add your opinions!

3 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans "I wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer"

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc It exists!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@sangwinc So no

0 favourites 0 retweets

The wordpress editor on Firefox mobile is such a pain to use! Moving the cursor just doesn't work at all: it gets stuck at a certain point and no matter what I do, that's where typed letters end up

1 favourite 0 retweets

If you've ever wanted to hear me sing an integer sequence, here's your chance twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @matthras

@matthras I've added this tweet as a reference at whystartat.xyz/wiki/!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@matthras hahah! Of course twitter didn't think the ! was part of the link!

1 favourite 0 retweets

Two gardeners had a duel:
Trial by combat.
Each chose their favourite tool:
Combat by trowel.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson I am not a number! My name is Iggle Piggle!

1 favourite 0 retweets

@chadtopaz @virtualcourtney Antiderivative and antiintegral instead?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall Scenes from twitter HQ:

0 favourites 0 retweets

Preparing a presentation on decolonising the curriculum for tomorrow.

I'm... not speaking from experience, let's say that.

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge YES!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Maybe "The order of terms matters even when they commute"

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Maybe it's an inconsistency? Or maybe we need a new category

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge What do you think about an "Unspoken conventions" category? I think that's interesting, and your page has made me think of "write terms in decreasing order of degree"

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge I just added that!

0 favourites 0 retweets

Spent a moment making sure isthisprime.com/game/ works on tiny viewports. I got a decent score, too!

4 favourites 0 retweets

There's no #BigMathOff this year, but if you're not like me and have time to do fun maths, here's something similar from @3blue1brown twitter.com/3blue1brown/st…

5 favourites 0 retweets

The "is this prime?" game (isthisprime.com/game/) recently passed 3 million attempts, which I might not have noticed if @sioroberts hadn't written this lovely article about it: technologyreview.com/2021/07/18/102…
I like how they embedded the game in the post!

25 favourites 7 retweets

@chadtopaz Could you do an online talk in UK time? To be in core hours for us it would have to be mid-morning for you at the latest, if I've got your time zone right

0 favourites 0 retweets

@chadtopaz Cool! I might send you an email soon

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @KJMDPhD

@KJMDPhD What did you do to get this?

0 favourites 0 retweets

Staring at my mp3 library and wondering who tagged Ray Barretto as "reggae".

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall I like this

16 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@edsouthall These shapes all have the same area. Any surprises?

23 favourites 7 retweets

In reply to @danicquinn

@danicquinn @edsouthall Like this? While doing this I double-checked the area of the ring, and I think I'd missed a factor of pi! Oops

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @JusSumChick

@JusSumChick @danicquinn @edsouthall yeah, I had that thought after I'd made the image!
Here's the same shapes in black and white

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Smylers2

@Smylers2 @icecolbeveridge I thought it might be this (bought in Barter Books!) but now it's off the shelf I can see it doesn't match your description. It's a very good book anyway

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Smylers2

@Smylers2 @icecolbeveridge I don't think this one has anything on voting

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @laryrober

@laryrober @edsouthall Every shape has area 1. The rectangle has sides 3 and 1/3. The ring has outer radius sqrt(9/pi) and inner radius sqrt(8/pi)

0 favourites 0 retweets

I've just seen an advert containing the phrase "Black Friday in July".
Nothing makes sense.

1 favourite 0 retweets

Dr.-ed again, this time by a colleague rejecting an internal funding application, who should really know better.

So I'm really getting the full academic experience, without a tiresome PhD!

3 favourites 0 retweets

Get in and follow Kyle before he hits the big time. He has a new book which I haven't read but am sure will contain both maths and jokes. twitter.com/kyledevans/sta…

5 favourites 0 retweets

Clearing my sinuses out after a really heavy cold

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @CounterOfSheep

@CounterOfSheep I know that feeling!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @dginev

@dginev That's a lovely example, thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@dginev I wonder what other examples there are of different operations with the same type that you could do this with

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl I also hate when people do this! The worst thing is both sides come out of it frustrated that the other one didn't follow The Normal Person Rules.
I suppose there isn't enough money in low-stakes encounter mediation to make that a thing

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl Yeah, I'm totally with you

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @JM_Field5

@JM_Field5 Evidence from here on plague Island is that even that isn't enough to change some people's minds

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared 1. On a humidity sensor
2. "100% fruit juice"
3. In a basic numeracy e-learning course, showing percent completion 🤨

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @PaulsPrattle

@PaulsPrattle I think there could be some interesting things to say about "proof", but I'm not sure about the others. There are different standards of proof, or even conceptions of what a proof fundamentally is, that would be worth describing.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@PaulsPrattle I'm not keen on compiling a list of words that mathematicians use differently to colloquial usage

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @panlepan

@panlepan Hah! Yes!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @TedG

@TedG Related : twitter.com/christianp/sta…

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths @WillZMarler @helenarney After that showbiz intro I reckon zero is a shoo-in for Best Digit in a Leading Role

9 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Andrew_Taylor

@Andrew_Taylor @standupmaths @stecks @lunasorcery ha! Love it

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Andrew_Taylor

@Andrew_Taylor @standupmaths @stecks @lunasorcery I looked at your code and thought it looked a lot shorter than I remembered!

1 favourite 0 retweets

WANTED: examples of symbols that you have to write carefully, so they won't be mistaken for something else.
I realised I had to drastically change my handwriting after I started my maths degree.
Thanks to @panlepan for getting this page started: whystartat.xyz/wiki/Easily_co…

10 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @Ayliean

@Ayliean @panlepan do you write 5 as a single stroke, or do the top line as a separate final stroke?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Ayliean

@Ayliean @panlepan That reminds me of the time we had a 'neat handwriting' exercise at school, and I spent like an hour on a single page. It was beautiful.
My teacher said "so you can write! Do that all the time"
Yes, if you don't mind me never getting past question 1...

4 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

What really gets my goat is that 6 and 9 are the same thing rotated. You could make up literally any squiggles you like for the most used symbols in human history, and you decided to reuse one?!?!

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @htfb

@htfb @panlepan Yes, some font designer has made things even worse

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge It's place value, not place and orientation value

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @suedepom

@suedepom @soupie66 @panlepan coincidentally, a couple of days ago I read this @inferencereview article about the hunt for an ancient temple that looked in the wrong place for 200 years because a scribe mistook ζ for ξ: inference-review.com/article/the-fo…

4 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @dginev

@dginev @panlepan Another serendipitous tweet: twitter.com/Flynn_DP/statu…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @GoranNewsum

@GoranNewsum @panlepan Like this?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @InertialObservr

@InertialObservr @panlepan Ah yes, zetatatatatatata

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @GoranNewsum

@GoranNewsum @panlepan Thanks!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans Yikes! Of all the days to make that joke

4 favourites 0 retweets

August

In reply to @neheritagelib

@neheritagelib Obviously the strawberry has an ancient right of panorama over the Sky call centre

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @sainsburys

@sainsburys suppose that the changes to my online grocery order weren't saved because the page got stuck on 'processing payment' all night. Is there any way of retrieving the things I'd added, to make a new order?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @beefok

@beefok @next_pcb Cor, that looks fun!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @TedG

@TedG @maanow Are there slides or a recording available?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @algorithmachine

@algorithmachine @elizabethmunch Would @cocalc_com count?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @hollykrieger

@hollykrieger I've had exactly this experience before! For me, I've found a good integer sequence works. I wrote this recently: aperiodical.com/2021/07/a-lull…

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @mathhombre

@mathhombre @SheckyR Is that the right link?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl Weirdly, we covered this in my fairly conservative English private school when I was 16.
I think my history teacher might have been trying to take the system down from the inside

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge 101101101101101?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Reading across the top row. Do all the rows have a repeating pattern?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@icecolbeveridge Oh wait, is it a spacefilling curve?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs re whystartat.xyz/wiki/Superscri… - all in favour of changing the way mediawiki renders footnotes in order to enhance the ambiguity?

1 favourite 0 retweets

Including my unicode guessing game twitter.com/glitch/status/…

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In reply to @christianp

I really appreciate how @glitch does these posts. I never sent a picture in to Art Attack, so this is the next best thing

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What's the deal with these hexagonal plots of land in Al Kufrah, Libya?
maps.app.goo.gl/zpqSddk613cKQz…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Ahh I'd hoped the oembed would have included a picture. Thanks!

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Is there a name for units of measurement that you can't reasonably add or subtract?
Examples: temperatures in Celsius; UK shoe sizes (a size 9 shoe is not as long as a size 4 and a size 5 shoe laid end to end)

8 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @BlindMath

@BlindMath Hmmm, I think that might be too strong - without context, is interpret that as meaning two measurements can't be compared

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In reply to @lopeetall

@joshbfitzgerald Shoe sizes are linear - the length of a shoe is (12 inches - size×barleycorns)

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In reply to @sarahlovesmaths

@sarahlovesmaths Good suggestion! I can't prove it but I just had exactly the same thought while putting the baby to bed

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In reply to @BlindMath

@BlindMath @joshbfitzgerald Ah! I guessed that there's a different definition of 'nonlinear' to my fuzzy understanding

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In reply to @johnharvey_math

@johnharvey_math I wasn't sure about what degrees Kelvin represent. Does something at 200K have as much energy as two things at 100K?

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In reply to @johnharvey_math

@johnharvey_math Yes, that sounds right to me. Always worth hedging your bets on twitter though!

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In reply to @christianp

@johnharvey_math Oh, but maybe something at 200K gives off as much energy as two 100K things next to each other? Is that how temperature is defined?

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In reply to @johnharvey_math

@johnharvey_math @langtoneagle Shoe sizes also have both of these properties

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In reply to @shin_dmitry

@shin_dmitry Nice, thanks!

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In reply to @apgox

@apgox @johnharvey_math @langtoneagle @johncarlosbaez Thanks! That's a useful word to know

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue I don't include the Mohs scale

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In reply to @matthras

@matthras The Greek mathematicians I work with do it the same as everyone else

(but like to grumble about how what we write isn't real Greek)

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson 💩 + 💩

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In reply to @suedepom

@suedepom At least the bust measurement is nominally a straightforward length.

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In reply to @christianp

@suedepom Chest measurement? Fill in whichever is the number

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In reply to @suedepom

@suedepom Aha

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In reply to @JM_Field5

@JM_Field5 Yesterday at the play farm I saw a sign that began "Budgies were discovered in 1805..."
I was like, pretty sure my daughter discovered them just now

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In reply to @JM_Field5

@JM_Field5 What a coincidence!

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In reply to @christianp

@JM_Field5 I'll stop now, even sarcastic colonialism doesn't feel great

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The question occurred to me last night whether 'odd' meant 'not a multiple of 2' before it meant 'unusual', or the other way round.
Turns out it was the mathematical meaning first, according to etymonline.com/word/odd#etymo…

15 favourites 2 retweets

Parenting hack: use a spreadsheet to keep track of your children's needs.

Proud to announce the birth of my 27th son, Aaron. All his siblings, from Aron to Zron, are delighted.

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In reply to @stecks

@stecks My middle name is from my grandfather, empty word Perfect

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My employer's bold offer to encourage me to come back into the office, despite the high covid numbers: a free coffee during 'Re-connecting week'.

A cup of coffee is famously shorthand for "an almost negligible price", which seems quite low for perpetuating the pandemic

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The Newtonians had it right: by developing a completely insular mathematics, none of our students will be able to get answers to exam questions from chegg

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In reply to @Mathgarden

@Mathgarden Or, the stories that last longest are the most dramatic ones

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge You can always try, but I don't think your version is notably different to the one that's there. The OEIS isn't great for searching for formulas, so I don't think there's much benefit in having both forms

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston @johncarlosbaez @apgox @tim_hosgood What I want to know is why American English dropped the o in moustache

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Reading an old Delia Smith book. It's really of its time!
I was prepared for "really garlicky chilli pasta" to only use 4 cloves of garlic, but "4 pieces jalapeño pepper"?!?!

"Serves 2"?!?!?!?!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson It said "from a jar", so I suppose ready-sliced jalapeños

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Two hours into subtitling a 30-minute video. YouTube Studio and gnome-subtitles have between them crashed half a dozen times. I give up!

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In reply to @JimPropp

@JimPropp Yes, that's what I was trying to do. For some reason YouTube studio kept getting stuck at one frame and wouldn't seek backwards or forwards. Only reloading the page fixed it

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In reply to @JanDoesMath

@JanDoesMath @fermatslibrary It's even in the OEIS! oeis.org/A174115

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A tiny open source contribution: in this tool to initialise a CITATION.cff file, I added help text and links to the spec for each field: citation-file-format.github.io/cff-initialize…

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Now when I come downstairs with the baby in the morning I have to turn a light on. Not happy.
Summer in Newcastle: blink and you miss it

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In reply to @suedepom

@suedepom With no plans to visit the south any time soon, that is very little consolation

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Is there a name for the way you order titles of things like books, where you ignore words like "The" at the start?
e.g. "Anteater, The; Bees Are Great" instead of "Bees Are Great; The Anteater".

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It's weird being asked to make a certificate of participation for someone who gave a talk at a conference.
Like, their employer won't accept seeing a recording of them giving the talk on the conference website, but will accept a PDF I knocked up in a few minutes?
Bureaucracy!

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In reply to @christianp

A strong part of me wanted to make something really snotty, to show my objection, but this is someone's job so instead I have to work out how fancy it needs to look in order to appease whoever has to approve it

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In reply to @njj4

@njj4 indeed. Someone last year asked for the certificate to be stamped and signed by university officials.
I was like, 1) I wouldn't know where to begin with that, even if 2) there's a pandemic on and I haven't physically seen a colleague in months

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In reply to @ascii_only

@ascii_only thanks! From that page, it doesn't seem there's a specific name for the convention of ignoring common words from the start

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In reply to @stecks

@stecks @MiniGirlGeek

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In reply to @virgil_pierce

@virgil_pierce Yeah, I'd like to make these as a matter of course for people who need them, but I have no idea what the requirements are

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In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths @IndependentSage Thanks for all you did, Kit. You've got your priorities right!

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If marching about demanding socialism was currently a thing, this would be on many placards twitter.com/ChristianSpenc…

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In reply to @Tom_Ruen

@Tom_Ruen @panlepan @akivaw @standupmaths or, a colourblind person's perspective: don't use colours at all

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Looking at Canvas's (old) quiz engine.
For a numerical question, you can set an "answer with precision": you give a decimal answer, and an integer precision.
It looks like "precision" means "significant figures", since 12.345 gets rounded down to 12.34.
But...

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In reply to @christianp

The marking is also confusing. "12.34" is marked correct, as I expected, but so is "12.340", which doesn't represent the same precision.
While the QTI export's marking condition just says 12.335 < answer <= 12.345, that's not how Canvas marks it: "12.33888" is marked incorrect.

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In reply to @christianp

Nobody told the person who made the front-end, because when I write 12.345 in the box it's immediately replaced by 12.3400, implying "precision" means "decimal places".

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In reply to @christianp

This stuff isn't simple: @NclNumbas has a tonne of options for how to mark a single number (docs.numbas.org.uk/en/latest/ques…)
It feels like Canvas makes every mistake it can, resulting in contradicting at least one assumption anyone might make

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In reply to @panlepan

@panlepan @Tom_Ruen @akivaw @standupmaths I don't know why I'm wasting my time doing this, but I thought alternating solid and outline would be clearer

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*clicking the "regenerate values" button until I get the ones I want*

"hmm, there are 100 combinations, I'd have to be very lucky to get the one I want"

*three clicks later*

"Oh!"

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In reply to @monsoon0

@monsoon0 I think I could muster up 770 papers with different opinions about whether Thompson's group F is amenable...

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Does anyone disagree that the cube is the least prismy prism?

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue That's fair, but when I look at a cube I just don't think 'prism'

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Every topologist: paaaaaiiirs of paaaaaants! twitter.com/biettetimmons/…

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In reply to @mrallanmaths

@mrallanmaths I think they are the most prismy prisms

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What's my pattern?

1,2,3,6,4,5,12,10,8,7,...

(not a #LullabySequence, or at least I haven't done the maths to make it easy to chant without stopping to think yet)

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In reply to @Alan_Taylor_314

@Alan_Taylor_314 I can give you as many as you like. Here are the next few:

20,18,16,14,9,...

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In reply to @Alan_Taylor_314

@Alan_Taylor_314 I love that you can't see it! I think you must have made an assumption about what kind of pattern it is.
The next number is 30.

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In reply to @drvinceknight

@drvinceknight I'd replace the . with [^\$] so that it works on lines with more than one pair of dollars

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In reply to @drvinceknight

@drvinceknight and while doing this properly, you might as well deal with escaped dollars:

:%s/\\\@<!\$\(\([^\$]\|\\\$\)*\)\\\@<!\$/\\(\1\\)/g

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In reply to @blatherwick_sam

@blatherwick_sam Not the way I'm thinking of it

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Any takers for this? twitter.com/christianp/sta…

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In reply to @sarahlovesmaths

@sarahlovesmaths Yes!

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared I don't drink, so my guesses in increasing order of likeliness of "is there really a gin with this name":

Gintegral. g∈. Gindivisible. 90% proof by ginduction.

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Hmm.. isthisplanar.com doesn't exist yet

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In reply to @christianp

'Give the virus a head start week' update: they've added biscuits to the offer.

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths @helenarney @joshuagates You missed a golden opportunity to show a title card reading "RDER SHE WRO" there.

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Calculating this banana's radius of curvature. #TMIPBreaks

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In reply to @christianp

For the 99% of people following who aren't at #TMiP2021: I'm attending the Talking Maths in Public conference, and we've been asked to tweet what we're doing to relax in the breaks.
I won't be doing this every time, because sheesh I'll want to relax!

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared Pick three points on the banana; draw normals from there, and if the curvature is constant (or you fudge it for the purposes of a tweet) they'll meet at one point. The radius of curvature is the distance from that point to the banana

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @Joel_Feinstein 0∈ℤ⁺ would make sense in France, where zero is both positive and negative, so would be worth using if you consider ℕ to start at 1.

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @Joel_Feinstein ooh, I've just spotted something that might be good for the wiki: I'd write ℤ₊, not ℤ⁺. @Joel_Feinstein, would you normally use a superscript, or did you just find the wrong unicode character?

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Just saw an advert for the burger place in the Grainger Market and now I really really want to go into town and catch coronavirus

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In reply to @Joel_Feinstein

@Joel_Feinstein @KarenCampe @peterrowlett I always go with subscript >0

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In reply to @bahran_cihan

@bahran_cihan @pwr2dppl Don't count on these being removable. I had a few when I was renting, and they ripped a fair bit of paint off.

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In reply to @Alan_Taylor_314

@Alan_Taylor_314 Want another hint? Or just the answer?

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In reply to @divbyzero

@divbyzero Have you seen this by Danny Calegari? lamington.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/lay…

8 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @becky_k_warren

@becky_k_warren have you seen this? twitter.com/CuttleXYZ/stat…

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Coming soon: a million "introduction to dynamical systems" worksheets in desmos twitter.com/Desmos/status/…

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As a fan of maths facts, I'm very pleased to see that Tanya Khovanova has been adding to her great site numbergossip.com

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I'm playing with @CuttleXYZ , trying to make some @becky_k_warren style swirly knots

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In reply to @matthen2

@matthen2 It looks like you've got the same pen plotter I have! Was it hard for you to set up, or was I just particularly inept?

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In reply to @matthen2

@matthen2 Yes, that's what I've got! Did you find the Australian guy on YouTube who explains how the delivered kit differs from the instructions?
I also have some python code to send gcode

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl There's a lot of unexplained magic in first calculus courses and I agree that this is one of the worst parts. Although, for students learning at the pattern-matching level, it's not much different to the chain/quotient/product rules

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Hey @Samuel_Hansen, what can you tell me about taxonomies of mathematics? Anything? Specifically, I'm interested in taxonomies of mathematical topics as they're taught, from secondary to undergraduate level.
This is an open question to anyone else who can offer expertise

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared @Samuel_Hansen I have a dim memory that I've talked with you about this in the past. This is for @NclNumbas: we have a large library of maths questions, and want to organise them. At the moment we use the mathcentre taxonomy, which has big gaps and is weirdly specific in other places.

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In reply to @christianp

@honeypisquared @Samuel_Hansen @NclNumbas Questions I want to answer:
* Hierarchical, or something more complex?
* Just objects, e.g. 'quadratic equations', or just tasks, e.g. 'factorise a quadratic', or a mix of both? (mathcentre is a mix, but heavily objects)
* How to relate to standards such as GCSE and Common Core

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared @Samuel_Hansen @NclNumbas @CambridgeMaths can I see that?

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In reply to @christianp

@honeypisquared @Samuel_Hansen @NclNumbas @CambridgeMaths but you're focused on primary and secondary, right?

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared @Samuel_Hansen @NclNumbas @CambridgeMaths are you free either today before 3pm, or Wednesday or Thursday morning?

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In reply to @Samuel_Hansen

@Samuel_Hansen @honeypisquared @NclNumbas @CambridgeMaths thanks!

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In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math Visiting @scienceatlife?

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In reply to @elinoroberts

@elinoroberts I'm currently 3/3.

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September

In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared at #TMiP2019 @ZoeLGriffiths had the idea for a show where you talk about maths in the kitchen, so I suppose I can offer talking about maths in the... loft?

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I remember in 2010, thinking "how will I put up with five years of this lot?"

Happier times.

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl Unless it came from the Équation region of France, it's just a sparkling relation.

39 favourites 5 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@pwr2dppl Seriously, my gut feeling is that for many people's definitions of 'equation', whether this is one depends on where x and y came from

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A notation question: how often do you use square brackets for grouping, with exactly the same meaning as parentheses?

Do you use them differently in handwritten vs typeset notation?

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge because it's hard to reliably draw parentheses of different sizes?

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In reply to @wspr

@wspr That would certainly get round the problem of "is this function application or implicit multiplication?" (whystartat.xyz/wiki/Juxtaposi…) but it's the opposite of what Mathematica does. I'd go with your way round if I had to choose, though

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There's lots of mockery of this error (possibly made in bad faith) but I can see how, knowing nothing, you could interpret it to mean "47% of adults are less likely".
The way English handles percentages isn't exactly rigorous. twitter.com/soapachu/statu…

4 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Absolutely

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In reply to @christianp

@icecolbeveridge "the dude from Right Said Fred is overconfident" isn't exactly news, like

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In reply to @RichardElwes

@RichardElwes It's hard to know where the balance is. Everyone's suddenly aware of the downsides of open-book assessment, but timed, invigilated exams also have well-documented problems with fairness and reliability.

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In reply to @RichardElwes

@RichardElwes OK, I had "at-home, open-book" but removed "at-home". I suppose the statement is good in that it doesn't knee-jerk say that at-home assessment shouldn't happen at all, which I've seen some institutions say.

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Is your point that people don't engage with your feelings about it, or that saying "that's easy" and referring to something you haven't heard of makes you feel worse?

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Thanks! I saw a lot of people responding to the funny words, and wanted some discussion of your actual point.

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Short form horror from the 4-year-old, while playing:

"When a husband and wife got back to their flat, another little girl was standing there!"

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @Samuel_Hansen @honeypisquared @NclNumbas @CambridgeMaths Can't you remember the trouble I caused last time I wrote a paper for Connections?

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In reply to @MiniGirlGeek

@MiniGirlGeek I was in a similar position when I graduated (I'm autistic and dyspraxic, are my main employability issues)
I got a job in my uni's maths support centre, by asking if there was any hourly work in the department I could do. I was lucky to be able to take my time finding something

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In reply to @christianp

@MiniGirlGeek I've always been up front with my disabilities and asking for accommodations, but I've only ever worked at this university, which is good about that sort of thing

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @Samuel_Hansen @honeypisquared @NclNumbas @CambridgeMaths I was very unhappy about having to make a word document. Maybe I kept that go myself!

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @kyledevans @AllenAndUnwin @AtlanticBooks the trick doesn't work otherwise

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In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect *makes note in presents list*

"Adam: hot pink camera lens"

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I've been playing with @CuttleXYZ a bit more. Here I made a nice tiling using the Rotation Tiling and Tiling Grid modifiers, then I wrote a custom modifier to fade out the colours on the outer pieces.
Here's a link: cuttle.xyz/@christianlp/T…

9 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@CuttleXYZ Following feedback from my wife, whom I married for her colour vision, here's a less eye-searing version

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I'm using my plotter for the first time in a while. I like this pattern!

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In reply to @Awantik73363734

@Awantik73363734 Everything has to be in vectors, but you can use interesting pens to draw with, and draw on stuff that wouldn't go through a printer

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In reply to @christianp

Here's the finished thing.

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In reply to @alisonstenning

@alisonstenning @TWhitleyBay1 I can remember seeing north shields from the top of Penshaw monument, but now I live up here I'd never thought to look the other way!

1 favourite 1 retweet

A musician can chart. An athlete can medal.
In what other realms of life can I noun?

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In reply to @ZoeLGriffiths

@ZoeLGriffiths Yes! Very good!

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In reply to @christianp

@ZoeLGriffiths Although is 'parent' technically a gerund?

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In reply to @Smylers2

@Smylers2 @ZoeLGriffiths Yes, and I thought 'parent' was a French or Latin gerund

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In reply to @GoranNewsum

@GoranNewsum It's common in Olympic coverage now.
E.g. this from teamgb.com/article/four-m…
"He’s medalled at the Commonwealth Games for Team England, as well as being a two-time European medallist."

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @GoranNewsum

@GoranNewsum I think that's already taken by these lads

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My employer's health and safety advice: take a break for 5-10 minutes out of every hour!

Also my employer: the legally mandated 20 minute lunch break is taken out of your pay

(I don't think this is at all unique to my employer)

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In reply to @christianp

Also a good idea: the text in your display screen equipment health and safety guidelines doesn't meet even the minimum WCAG threshold for contrast 👍

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In reply to @christianp

Communicating important but complicated and dull stuff to thousands of people is hard.
I wish there was a well-supported mechanism for giving feedback to improve this kind of text that didn't involve me starting emails "hi, I'm autistic and more pedantic than you'd believe"

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In reply to @eqdynamics

@eqdynamics thank you for that encouragement

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In reply to @overleaf

@overleaf is it possible to select a portion of text and see where in the document's history it was added?

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In reply to @revdancatt

@revdancatt lovely picture!

What's the glass doing on top of the pen? Is it just weight to push the pen down?

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In reply to @zjorge

@zjorge @revdancatt I have a C battery taped to my pen holder. Less fancy!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @neheritagelib

@neheritagelib I'm desperate to see inside!

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In reply to @LearningMaths

@LearningMaths @alisonkiddle @helenjwc @MathsImpact I'd say something like "I'm interested in your interpretation of this question:" would make it clear there's an ambiguity, without revealing what it is

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Type the following string of three characters:

Q`!

I had to have four goes at it. How about you? It's something I don't think I have any muscle memory for.

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In reply to @christianp

(on a physical keyboard)

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I appreciate that being able to search tweets at all relies on a mind-blowing amount of clever code, but it surprised me just now that searching for "from:christianp shoe size" turned up nothing, but "from:christianp shoe sizes" gets the entire thread I was looking for.

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Oh no, a colleague has asked about tensors.

*frantically reads through the last month of @pwr2dppl's tweets*

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In reply to @JanDoesMath

@JanDoesMath I have, for no good reason, made it more complicated

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Some more playing with @CuttleXYZ. I've written a modifier to weave two paths together.

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I think I'm in the categorical dual of a zoom meeting: someone just said "this is not so much a comment as a question"!!

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A notation question:
The polar form of a complex number is r⋅exp(i⋅θ).

Which, if any, of these are in polar form?

A) 5⋅exp(2i)
B) 2⋅exp(i⋅π)
C) (4+√2)⋅exp(i)
D) exp((4+√2)⋅i)
E) exp(0i)
F) exp(0)
G) 1

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In reply to @RichardElwes

@RichardElwes Even G?

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In reply to @htfb

@htfb @RichardElwes the \cdots are just to give a little bit of space, really! Mathematical notation in plain text is hard

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In reply to @htfb

@htfb @RichardElwes would you really distinguish between E and F?

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In reply to @htfb

@htfb @RichardElwes interesting - so you distinguish between the real zero and the imaginary zero?

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In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc ah yes, I meant to!

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In reply to @RichardElwes

@RichardElwes I suppose my perspective is that the point of saying something is in 'polar form' is that you can read off the magnitude and argument.
'1' is equivalent by algebraic shuffling to '1⋅exp(0i)', but you have to know some facts about 1 to know what the argument is.

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In reply to @tausbn

@tausbn @CuttleXYZ Yeah, I spotted that but decided I'd keep quiet about it!

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In reply to @dginev

@dginev even G?

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In reply to @gregeganSF

@gregeganSF LA and Houston are pretty spread out. Looking at google maps, I can get distances between 2160km and 2278km by picking different points on the city limits. So Mathematica is still probably wrong, but maybe not as wrong as you'd think

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In reply to @gregeganSF

@gregeganSF is that calculation in one of your screenshots?

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron You need to start the supply chains newsletter. If not you, who?

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett that desk is giving me palpitations!

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In reply to @dginev

@dginev yes, I think that the relation between notation and quantities with types is something that most mathematicians don't really think about, but becomes a big problem when computers get involved

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In reply to @christianp

@dginev in this instance, I'm specifically interested in the notation

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At the end of a French video: "Likez, Commentez, Partagez".

You cowards! Have the courage to say "Sharez"

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett phewww

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett I definitely belong to the "occasional clean sweep" school of tidying

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Making this document look more like serious academic writing by switching from sans-serif to serif.

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In reply to @LizahvdAart

@LizahvdAart have you seen that study where they ask people to draw a bike, without a reference? There doesn't seem to be a single human who can do it

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared I think the only programming education person I follow is @ShriramKMurthi

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In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths not a great day to use that exact phrase

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Today I've been using @CuttleXYZ to draw a palace. My plan is to use the pen plotter to draw this on cardboard, for little L-Ps to play with.
Architects don't @ me.
cuttle.xyz/@christianlp/P…

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I've just realised I can mute the abbreviation 'NFT' and never have to engage with that nonsense.

Interested to see if I see this tweet again, though!

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In my continuing quest to boil the concept of a 'game' down to its minimum, I've made the "is this prime" game easier and much much harder

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In reply to @christianp

Video description: starting with a screen titled "Is this a quiz?", a series of questions: Is 7 a number? Is 0 a number? Is 9 a number? Is 3 even? Is 6 even? Then "Game over", and I let out a deep sigh.

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In reply to @modeltheorist

@modeltheorist I don't, and I spent a long time looking for any last year

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In reply to @christianp

@modeltheorist although @pkrautz might know of some that aren't completely terrible

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In reply to @sigfpe

@sigfpe I don't think I agree with this. There can absolutely still be gatekeeping even if the person being kept out has a good understanding of the topic they're being kept out of.

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In reply to @Desmos

@Desmos is desmos.com/accessibility the same page that used to be at learn.desmos.com/accessibility ?

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In reply to @sigfpe

@sigfpe I suppose it depends on whether the question is "Can I learn this?" or "Can I talk with someone else about this?" For the latter, you can gatekeep by rejecting someone if they learnt the thing from blog posts or whatever.

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Me, every few months: I should make the @NclNumbas look more like these cool edtech things I keep seeing!

Moments later: oh, they're terrible for accessibility

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In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect what did you think caused CSS resources to be loaded, or had you just never thought about it?

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In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect yeah, it definitely doesn't happen when the CSS is read, because then you wouldn't need to think about pre-loading
(and you'd need to have the stuff to handle resources references in an element's style attribute anyway)

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In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect while we're talking about frontend matters: I just decided to look at a domain I used to own, takenot.es. The right-pointing arrow is implemented as a ligature of the text 'arrow_forward' a custom font!!
While my unicode → character gently weeps

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Gang, I think I'm going to start putting a little bit of space between things that are multiplied together

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In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc let's not get ahead of ourselves!

I've been thinking about how sensitive we are to spacing as providing semantic information. I expected adding a bit of space to look completely wrong, but it was the opposite!

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In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc ta!

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In reply to @MathsTechnology

@MathsTechnology @geogebra interesting! Do you know if it's always done that?

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In reply to @MathsTechnology

@MathsTechnology @geogebra aha! Numbas does the same, but students continually get tripped up by it. I suppose the immediate feedback of the geometry bit not looking right is more noticeable than just the rendering of the notation

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In reply to @RyanTinsleyPhys

@RyanTinsleyPhys No?

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In reply to @apgox

@apgox @MathsTechnology @geogebra I think Mathematica is forced to do this because it doesn't do as much with spacing in its rendering as TeX does.
Now I wonder if Knuth has written anything on the subject

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Each day of the DMV-ÖMG conference has activities from 09.00 until 18.30! Is that normal??

staff.fim.uni-passau.de/~zumbraegel/dm…

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In Python, you can filter a list comprehension by adding an if statement to the end, e.g.:

[x for x in list if x<y]

I wish you could do the same in a for loop, e.g.:

for x in list if x<y:
...print(x)

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In reply to @pippinsboss

@pippinsboss @Mathematical_A Nice!

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In reply to @Mathematical_A

@Mathematical_A your website is down: I get "The service is unavailable" when I try to load m-a.org.uk, or any page under it.

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In reply to @dginev

@dginev yes!

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In reply to @bbarber_

@bbarber_ I don't like the two instances of 'for', and there's a reason comprehensions replaced filter and map

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In reply to @MathsImpact

@MathsImpact I've actually had people tell me quite firmly that • shouldn't be used for scalar multiplication at certain levels in order to avoid confusing students when they see vector dot product
(I disagree)

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In reply to @JM_Field5

@JM_Field5 I got a leaflet through the door for a company offering this, and I was like - when in this geological epoch has there not been enough water to grow grass in the north of England??
So I assume someone has invented a thing and franchised it out

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Just learnt that in Germany, the equivalent of STEM is MINT (Mathe, Ingenierung, Naturwissenschaft, Tischtennis??)

Are there any more too-clever acronyms for nerdsports around the world?

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In reply to @Mathematical_A

@Mathematical_A thanks!

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In reply to @pippinsboss

@pippinsboss @Mathematical_A is there any chance you could send me a copy of that article?

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In reply to @pippinsboss

@pippinsboss @Mathematical_A done!

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In reply to @DavidB52s

@DavidB52s @MathsImpact I don't agree with this attitude. If the notation doesn't make the difference clear, we should try to improve the notation

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In reply to @Clare_L_Wallace

@Clare_L_Wallace

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In reply to @SpookySpctrlSeq

@SpookySpctrlSeq @pwr2dppl The correct answer is "problems"

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston @LucasVB 'Shortlex' is what I've always used

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue @robinhouston @LucasVB there are loads of words made from mixes of languages

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue @robinhouston @LucasVB I think much like Perl, at some point in England's past we declared that every word in every other language is a valid English word.

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I'm trying to do some writing about the design of @NclNumbas.
So far, I've written drafts of two articles.
The first is about marking algorithms: numbas.org.uk/behind-the-des…
And the second, which I've just finished, is about pattern-matching expressions: numbas.org.uk/behind-the-des…

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It's like they were trying to make a textbook example of problematic gender roles! twitter.com/Helen31098957/…

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In reply to @CardColm

@CardColm There's a blue plaque for Zamyatin in Jesmond, a Newcastle suburb. I used to walk past it every day, and I always meant to get a copy of "We". Not very into dystopias, now I'm living in one

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@chadtopaz "here's an algorithm that finds the shortest path through a graph. But am I just saying that, or does it actually do it?"

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Someone at work sent me this algebra puzzle, which I think came from The Times newspaper:

Solve 9ˣ+15ˣ=25ˣ.

(I know the answer)

Have you seen it before? Did you see it in The Times?

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Yes, I feel the same

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In reply to @christianp

@icecolbeveridge You were much quicker than I was!

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In reply to @ggerardk

@ggerardk Thanks!

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway Water! Water! And not a drop to drink!

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Give me the confidence to reinvent randomised maths assessment in Excel, and to claim it's plagiarism-proof: arxiv.org/abs/2109.09277
(why is this in Math.HO?)

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Here's me wasting valuable seconds (aggregated over several weeks) holding down the left mouse button on firefox's new tab button to pick a container, when it pops up instantly if I click the right mouse button!
What a dope!

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University homepages should make it easy to check if a certain person still works there. Academics move around so much, and the continued existence of a personal homepage on the uni's domain isn't always evidence they're still there!

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @RobJLow @tstarkey1212 I stand by that tag

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In reply to @lukejanicke

@lukejanicke Somehow, I don't know how, I'm still allowed to have my personal homepage be a static page, which is stored on a shared Unix server - staff.ncl.ac.uk/christian.perf…
I don't know how long it would take to disappear if I moved on

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If I said "the gender pay gap is 15%", does that mean men are paid 15% more than women, or women are paid 15% less than men?

(assume wlog men are paid more than women)

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In reply to @linguanumerate

@linguanumerate @phc27x @sam_power_825 yes, that's how I've always interpreted it.
It just occurred to me that someone wanting to make more of an impact would use percentage of women's pay, which would give a bigger number. But "pay gap of 200%" when men earn 3× as much would raise eyebrows, so maybe that's why

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In reply to @christianp

Following on from this: should percentage differences always be given in terms of the bigger quantity, unless you explicitly use the words "more" or "less"?

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@piplustwo how do you make the distinction? You could say salaries are positively biased towards men.
That would make sense if looking at a job traditionally performed by women, which men start doing, and they get paid more. Programming could be an example of that.

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I'm a bit uneasy about GitHub's dependabot training me to merge pull requests claiming to bump up dependency version numbers without looking at the actual commit inside

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron that used to be called a slashdotting

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Just closed a GitHub issue a fortnight younger than my daughter, who has just started nursery school: github.com/numbas/numbas-…
(Can I be excused for missing it at the time?)

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In reply to @minouette

@minouette mine does!

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In reply to @minouette

@minouette likewise

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A slightly more complicated #LullabySequence:

2,3,4,2,5,6,4,2,7,8,6,4,2,9,6,4,2,…

What's my pattern?

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett Hark at you with your injective halving operation!

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I've just found this great game by @mikenitowski - "Factors game" mnito.github.io/factors-game/
You move a number down a grid, choosing a number to combine with at each step. If it's a factor of your number, it divides, otherwise, it adds. The aim is to get to 1. It's very well made!

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Parenting

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson do you have some unintended global state?

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In reply to @GreyAlien

@GreyAlien Yesssss

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In reply to @northumbriana

@northumbriana There definitely is. The 'o' sound is distinctive too. I think Whitley High is the nexus

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Trying out two new things with my slides for a talk tomorrow: a QR code on each slide, pointing to exactly that slide; funky border-radius on images

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In reply to @christianp

(I've broken the habit of a lifetime and done some work at the weekend because I forgot to do it earlier in the week)

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In reply to @TilingBot

@TilingBot Oh well, they can't all be winners

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Currently watching German mathematicians in smart-casual dress cover Pharrell's "Happy".
What a start to my week

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In reply to @Coni777

@Coni777 The opening session of the DMV-ÖMG conference

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner it certainly got my attention

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In reply to @Coni777

@Coni777 no idea if there'll be a recording, sorry. I wouldn't expect so, since I had to pay an attendance fee

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In reply to @christianp

they're called the "Stormy Hill Hot Three".

Didn't quite top the Belgian one-man jazz band last time I was in the Netherlands, but it came close

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In reply to @Coni777

@Coni777 found it: youtube.com/watch?v=0ql8mb…

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In reply to @HigherGeometer

@HigherGeometer "Yeah, automatic label placement will be fine"

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Today I learned that Newcastle is roughly at the same latitude as the German-Danish border.
Not sure what to do with this information. Something to do with Otto von Bismarck, but what?

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Been up since 4 with the boy. Found an episode of Mr Tumble I haven't seen before. Get in!

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared my colourblind eyes say apple

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In reply to @josstified

@josstified let me consult my Professional Acronym Framework

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Grown-up maths people who don't need to do exams any more: when's the last time you used interval notation?

I'm talking about things like (1,3] for "the interval between 1 and 3, including 3 but not 1".

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In reply to @sbagley

@sbagley @elizabethmunch Now I'll always remember what heteroscedasticity means, so thanks!

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Does anybody know if there's a keyboard shortcut in Mac Safari that clears every form input on the page?
I'm trying to work out what happened in a very weird bug report from a student.

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton I've seen that page and didn't find anything relevant in it

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In reply to @TheCRISPRGuy

@chkyourbrain I'm not looking for a quick way of clearing a form, I'm trying to work out how this student apparently did that

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In reply to @PaulsPrattle

@PaulsPrattle that looks like they've just scraped stackoverflow and not provided links back to the original questions?

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In reply to @TheCRISPRGuy

@chkyourbrain I wrote the code. There isn't

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In reply to @GhostMutt

@GhostMutt there isn't

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In reply to @christianp

thanks for your suggestions, everyone. This one might have to remain a mystery!

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Past CLP has successfully pressured me into doing something I'd kept putting off: I'm giving a talk next Wednesday about some code that I wanted to have written by then. Started today!

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue Student was doing a @NclNumbas test, then all of a sudden every answer box was emptied. Student can't remember doing anything unusual, and as the developer of the system I know there's no function in it to make that happen.

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In reply to @danaernst

@danaernst I'm colourblind and my masters thesis had lots of Cayley graphs! Edge styles, or labels, is the way to go.
If you can't do without colour, colorbrewer2.org can give you a palette of at most 5 colourblind-safe colours, but realistically 4 is your max for thin edges

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18 months in, I still don't know how to end a work video call in a non-awkward fashion

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In reply to @christianp

I think the reason it's so much worse than an audio-only call is that there's inevitably a couple of seconds where you're trying to find the "end call" button, and you can see each other looking for it, and you can't be waving or making eye contact or whatever

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James looks giddy, like a kid in a sweet shop!
(which he has just finished filling with sweets) twitter.com/jamesgrime/sta…

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston @gregeganSF I did it recently. I've had no regrets!

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In reply to @christianp

@robinhouston @gregeganSF although I did see this thread, so it's clearly not a perfect solution

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October

In reply to @ch_nira

@ch_nira I'm sad I couldn't make it to your talk this morning. It's my day off, but I was intending to turn zoom on for the hour. Unfortunately my daughter had a raging temperature last night, so it's all hands on deck!

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In reply to @LongFormMath

@LongFormMath Probably. A student once put on her application for a summer project that she'd done some modelling. We later discovered it wasn't the kind we were interested in...

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In reply to @Bishnavitch

@Bishnavitch I know you like your food but this is a bit much, isn't it?

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Getting the pen plotter to draw some big maths notation to go on the wall behind me for video calls.
What should I get it to write?
Might start with a medley of ambiguous notation from whystartat.xyz

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In reply to @christianp

I've gone with this page of mathematical oddities to start with. Bit cross about the brackets in the second-last row going wrong

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In reply to @soupie66

@soupie66 But that's the whole point

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@chadtopaz If you order that one a briefcase of CIA secrets is brought to your table

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People who say ambiguous equations should just have more symbols in them: what do you do about this?

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In reply to @JDHamkins

@JDHamkins @pkrautz Or the other option is to introduce a symbol separating columns in a matrix

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In reply to @hartkp

@hartkp ooh, here's a challenge then: categorise these as column vector, square matrix, or invalid due to spacing

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner @JDHamkins so in a world where a small unary minus means negation, are the left-hand sides of my equations in the picture above equivalent?

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In reply to @JDHamkins

@JDHamkins @pkrautz I have a feeling @howie_hua has tweeted something about this in the past and I sort of agreed with it but couldn't quite be bothered to actually follow through and do it

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In reply to @JDHamkins

@JDHamkins @BernhardWerner how do you resolve these ambiguities in handwriting?

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In reply to @Smylers2

@Smylers2 @JDHamkins @pkrautz my thoughts exactly!

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In reply to @JDHamkins

@JDHamkins @BernhardWerner I think my point is, given that reliably getting spacing right is hard: shouldn't we do make a mark like sticking a comma between entries in a row, to make it clearer?

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In reply to @christianp

@JDHamkins @pkrautz @howie_hua Here's Florian Cajori on the subject. I endorse none of these solutions!
archive.org/details/histor…

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In reply to @logopetria

@logopetria There are often alternatives to sub/superscripts: some people write exp(long thing) instead of e^{long thing}, for example, to avoid putting too much in a superscript.

Is there an alternative notation for this situation?

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In reply to @christianp

This thread brought to you by whystartat.xyz/wiki/Space_is_….

Summary of solutions offered:

* use a smaller dash for "negative" and longer for "minus"
* superscript dash for "negative"
* get really good at judging spacing by eye
* go big on column padding

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In reply to @GoranNewsum

@GoranNewsum If you just saw the left hand side of the equation, what would you put in the right?

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Don't Let The Other People On The Zoom Call Know Your Shoulder Has Fallen Out Of Its Socket Challenge.

#JustEhlersDanlosThings

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @missradders Oh yes, I saw it went in. V busy at the mo. Will try to look tonight or tomorrow night.

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @missradders No, thank you!

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Scheduled for tomorrow morning

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In reply to @CardColm

@CardColm I'm pretty sure our algebra module has a bit about completing the square mod n

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I really regret deleting the code I decided wouldn't work a few days ago.
It was only a page or so, but I don't fancy writing it again

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In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans @AllenAndUnwinUK I've got mine!

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Sorry for the terminally dull tweet, but I need to vent: why is Sharepoint so absolutely insistent on not letting links or the browser's back and forward buttons work how they should?

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In reply to @christianp

it feels like it wants to be a single page app, where things that look like links can in fact just change the content of the current page, but when the vast majority of links are to different documents, that doesn't really work

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Trying to find out what the base of the natural logarithm is called in R.
Unsurprisingly, googling "r e" didn't turn up anything useful

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In reply to @PaulsPrattle

@PaulsPrattle the opposite - exp - but thanks

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In reply to @osvaldoics

@osvaldoics I don't know if that's something @ColorBrewer does

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The word 'incomprehensibly' has half of the letters of the alphabet in it.

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Does anyone have a convincing story about why exponentiation isn't commutative?

Like, what happens here:
a + b: repeat "add 1" b times
a × b: repeat "add a" b times
a^b: repeat "times a" b times

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In reply to @christianp

are there other sequences of operations built by repeating the previous one that are all commutative?

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo @icecolbeveridge @robinhouston The story goes that Dracula has to count everything he sees.
I feel like I've just dropped a bag of marbles in front of a gang of vampires.

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Suggestions for mathematical diagrams that you might want to assess a student's interaction with, please. Interaction could be moving objects in the diagram, typing a number or formula in a box, or ticking checkboxes.

So far I've got...

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In reply to @christianp

Placing objects on a Venn diagram: drag a point to an appropriate position, or tick boxes representing membership in each of the sets.

Move a point to given coordinates: drag a point on a grid, or type in Cartesian coordinates

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In reply to @christianp

I suppose I should just take a wander round geogebra.org...

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In reply to @christianp

Make a spanning tree: include/exclude edges of a graph by clicking them or toggling checkboxes.

Label parts of a diagram: move labels next to the corresponding objects

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner at the moment I'm looking at stuff that can be assessed, i.e. cases where you give the student a score based on what they did

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In reply to @christianp

@BernhardWerner please do send me CindyJS examples!

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner these are great, thanks!

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway and now I have to go and find it on youtube

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @tombutton You can't spell it without 'oral balm' either, but that might be a coincidence

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They boy watched the Teletubbies eating breakfast and now he wants his.
"Beffeh!" he shouts. "BEFFEH!!!"
Thanks, Teletubbies.

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths Three comments/questions:
1 - Leeds is now quadratic?
2 - We can't have uppercase digits, but we can have zero-flat?
3 - I have to note your face's journey from "here's Matt with another maths fact" to "isn't that cool? This many eyebrows can't be wrong!" during this video

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@AGolian crikey, I made that! Where did you dig it up from?
Many years later, @mscroggs made a much better one with more manifolds: mscroggs.co.uk/mathsteroids/

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eeeeeee eeeeeeeee eee eee eeeee ee Eeeeeee, e eeee ee
eeeeeeeee, e eeee, eee, ee eeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeee (eeeeee
eee eeee eee ee e eeee eee eeeeeee Eeeee-Eeeeeeee eeeeeee...

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In reply to @christianp

(the opening paragraph of Georges Perec's "A Void", with every letter replaced by e)

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In reply to @henryseg

@henryseg @AGolian @mscroggs @ZenoRogue @roice713 I have a hyperbolic asteroids somewhere...

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl @blkmathmagic I know nothing, and I know about him

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In reply to @professorbrenda

@professorbrenda @stevenstrogatz TITs buildings encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Tits_buil…

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In reply to @professorbrenda

@professorbrenda @stevenstrogatz Astonishing

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In reply to @christianp

@professorbrenda @stevenstrogatz CATegory theory

(I couldn't resist putting the cat among the pigeons)

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In reply to @kelseyahe

@kelseyahe We're happy to have stuff from students at @aperiodical

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron @writesJW I also had this recently and was told it was the sensors in the fridge compartment, which can't be replaced, so also bought a new one. Moved the old one to the garage and plugged it in and it started working again.
So try voodoo?

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International Tell Someone You Love That Excel Is Not The Right Medium For Forms Day

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@chadtopaz @pwr2dppl I'm intrigued by the possibility of other chicken recipes that don't involve killing it first.

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In reply to @christianp

this form contains checkboxes (reasonable: it's a form) which web excel doesn't support (reasonable: spreadsheets are for text) so I have to log in to the Virtual Desktop to load desktop Excel (unreasonable: we have like three official ways of making forms, one made in-house)

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In reply to @christianp

@chadtopaz @pwr2dppl "Step 1: Take a poussin. Listen to its hopes and concerns for its future. Show it the film Chicken Run. Together, select a variety of millet to use in step 2"

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In reply to @GreyAlien

@GreyAlien maybe people think there's more likely to be a vulnerable person in Boots?

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In reply to @FMSDiversityNCL

@FMSDiversityNCL @EqualityNCLUni could you put the sign-up link in the text of a tweet instead of just in the image?

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In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall pathlib is the best invention in a very long time

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Before I click on this headline: mean or median?

And follow-up question: how far apart are they?

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In reply to @christianp

I'll click on the link at midday. My mind is a blur of possibilities!

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In the vein of artisanal integers, such as brooklynintegers.com, I'd like to start producing artisanal proofs, where "wlog" stands for *with* loss of generality!

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Anyone want to take median and enrich Paul? twitter.com/ptwiddle/statu…

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Just typed the sentence "in this measurement, large outliers are common".

How do I phrase that so it's not an oxymoron? Like, quite often when you collect this data, there's an outlier.

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In reply to @christianp

well, I've clicked on the link: bbc.co.uk/news/business-…
It doesn't specify mean or median, but gives a more precise figure of £78.54, which couldn't be the median unless there are some very fancy ATMs

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In reply to @PaulsPrattle

@PaulsPrattle I'm describing what you're likely to see in a scatter graph, so not that

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In reply to @dandersod

@dandersod I like the way you think

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Currently in the audience of a Zoom talk. The number of different notifications coming through the speaker's mic are stressing me out.
Dude, I think you're too busy to speak to us!

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whoah, I've just noticed that Neil Sloane mentioned one of my integer sequences in a talk at Doron Zeilberger's experimental math class! oeis.org/A268176/a26817…

If coming up with questions was as hard as answering them, I'd feel a real sense of achievement now

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In reply to @christianp

and looking through the history, I see it's a classic CLP OEIS submission: I was fiddling around following an aesthetic, and the incredibly patient editors fixed it until it was presentable.

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson Would you like someone to talk it through with?

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While trying not to scratch the chicken pox I've somehow caught for the second time, I wondered why so many medically unlikely things happen to me.

But then I channelled my inner @d_spiegel and thought: how many rare illnesses should I expect to have in my lifetime?

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In reply to @christianp

How many "1 in 1000" illnesses should I expect to have? If they're independent of each other and I'm no more susceptible than average, it still depends on how many different illnesses they are.
If there are 1000, I should expect to catch 1, and shouldn't be surprised if I catch 2

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A list of all the characters you can use to write words is called an alphabet or a syllabary.
What is the list of characters you can use to write numbers called? Is there a name?

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In reply to @christianp

first algebraist to say 'alphabet' is getting blocked

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton I only know that as an adjective. Is it also a noun?

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner following 'syllabary', I think I like 'digitary'

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Challenge: starting from durham.ac.uk, get to durham.ac.uk/departments/ac… only by clicking on links.
There *must* be something I'm missing!
Expanding the challenge to typing in the search box, even "mathematics department" doesn't get it on the first page of results!

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In reply to @JonathanHoefler

@JonathanHoefler ah yes, thanks. I spent a while trying to remember if I know the difference between 'digit' and 'numeral', and forgot about 'figure'.

So is there a name for the set of figures?

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In reply to @ZlM0N

@SimonVonDulwich ahhh, that's where it's hiding! Thanks!
Did you do this on mobile? I think on desktop the large nav at the top is much more prominent than those links in the footer

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In reply to @JonathanHoefler

@JonathanHoefler thanks!
I'm still not sure if this scratches my itch: I can say "the figures", but I can't say "a figures".
Like: "the Welsh alphabet has no X", vs "the Roman <set of figures> has no 0". I want one word for "set of figures", and apparently I'm willing to waste a day finding it

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In reply to @JonathanHoefler

@JonathanHoefler can you explain how it's imprecise? I know nothing and I don't think I can see the distinction you're making

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In reply to @mathzorro

@mathzorro ah! I did just miss a link in the right place, then

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson yes! I've yet to find someone who's happy with the way sharepoint works.
I think we should put the librarians in charge of the intranet.

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In reply to @JonathanHoefler

@JonathanHoefler Thanks for indulging me with your expertise! I think I agree with most of that.
I'd consider √ more like punctuation than a letter of the alphabet.
I didn't really start with the "what's in the alphabet" question -

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In reply to @christianp

@JonathanHoefler ... it was more: when writing my salary, I use the 'digitary' 012345678798. When writing a binary number, I use the 'digitary' 01.
It's not about what they mean, it's about which digits can come up.

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In reply to @JonathanHoefler

@JonathanHoefler me too! Have you seen my site whystartat.xyz ?
If you have any typography-related qualms to record there, I'd love to see them

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In reply to @JonathanHoefler

@JonathanHoefler (p or P does not alter 'perfect'. The meaning remains the same 😉)

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In reply to @miclugo

@miclugo @schrisomalis ooh, that's going on my Christmas list! Thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @howie_hua

@howie_hua 2+2 = 2×2 = 2²

Like, they forgot they'd already cast 4 in one the earlier episodes, *twice*

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In reply to @juliajcarter

@juliajcarter Hi! Was this analysis ever published?

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Is this the only regular 15-gon in my house? Is there a regular polygon with more sides somewhere?
What about your house?

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In reply to @dandersod

@dandersod Yes, it does.

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle I reckon so. How many points?

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Abductive reasoning: I have no reason to believe it isn't

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@chadtopaz Why would you leave a mess?

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This is really clever! twitter.com/JanDoesMath/st…

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In reply to @josstified

@josstified You're still on SVN?!?!

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TeX is a markup language for mathematics designed to be easy to type on a standard US physical keyboard.
What would an equivalent designed to be easy to type on a phone keyboard look like?

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In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc Yes, but that's a different input method. I'm thinking of how much you can get out of a standard phone keyboard

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I have protanopia: I'm really colourblind. I have a couple of apps on my phone which claim to name colours, but they don't work very well.
So I've had a go at making my own, as an easy to remember web page: what-colour-is-that.glitch.me

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In reply to @christianp

all the apps I've used before make the same few mistakes: they give only one colour name, with no confidence estimate, and the list of colours is often _way_ more specific than I can deal with

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In reply to @christianp

my page takes a rolling average over the last few frames, so it doesn't bounce around so much. It shows the top 5 guesses, along with bars showing how confident it is. I've limited the list of colour names to those from simple wikipedia: simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour

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In reply to @christianp

I went further and weighted some of the colour names, so you have to be _really_ close to 'teal' for that to be the best guess, but 'red', 'green' and 'blue' come top more easily.

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In reply to @christianp

I suspect that the apps I've used in the past just use Euclidean distance in RGB colour space to work out closeness. I've used the CIEDE2000 metric, which is supposed to better match how humans with normal colour vision perceive difference

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In reply to @christianp

the last thing is that the camera display only takes up a small portion of the screen; the rest is filled with whatever colour it's naming at the moment - it really helps to check that it's working properly!

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In reply to @CharlesDWimmer

@CharlesDWimmer Yeah, next time the baby has a nap I'm going to look into whether I can control the camera's exposure

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In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect Thanks, great big tool

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Who called them 'virtual school visits over Zoom' and not 'clopen evenings'?

7 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett 🤷‍♂️

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett If I switch away and come back on android Firefox it goes black, so there must be something I need to get it to react to

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November

Justin is such a pro that he does a bad impression of Lord Tumble when he's not in the costume. Huge respect.
#CLPs6amSomethingSpecialTweet

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Back at work after a week off. 300 unread emails in my inbox.
In half an hour, I've cleared 50 of them. Should be finished by 11, then!

#GoodAtMyJob
#BadAtReadingEmails

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is there a word for when a term signifying a divisive topic becomes acceptable, and then starts being used for so many different things it loses almost all meaning?
A recent example I'm thinking of is 'decolonisation', and I suppose before that 'diversity'.

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In reply to @christianp

it seems like all of a sudden decolonisation has become A Thing We Are Going To Do, but I don't get the sense that many people saying that have a clear idea what they mean

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In reply to @christianp

I first heard it in South Africa in 2016, where students were trying to force their universities to examine where the material they taught came from, and use traditionally local ways of knowledge more. That felt easy to understand, and definitely didn't have institutional support

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In reply to @christianp

now here in Newcastle, I've been in so many meetings and events where decolonisation was mentioned, and it seems to be boiling down to 'teach history', and the people talking about it are largely like me, white and British.

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In reply to @linguanumerate

@linguanumerate my first feeling was that it's some kind of saturation: the sum of everyone's understanding of what the term means eventually encompasses everything

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In reply to @christianp

I think this also happens a lot in tech, whenever there's a buzzword that is good to be associated with.
'The cloud' feels like it's lost whatever loose meaning it originally had.

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In reply to @christianp

'Hipster' has had a long and varied history, but it had a fairly specific meaning in the early 2000s, before expanding to mean 'anything new I don't like'

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In reply to @gotai1234

@gotai1234

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In reply to @linguanumerate

@linguanumerate I agree!

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In reply to @GwendolynHuot

@GwendolynHuot thanks! I'll use that

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In reply to @christianp

oh, 0 unread emails at 10:00, but then I had a zoom meeting and forgot to tweet.
I drastically overestimated the importance of the emails I hadn't read!

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In reply to @sarahlovesmaths

@sarahlovesmaths hah, that's a good way of viewing it!

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Do my literature review for me before I do this experiment:
ask students to write out a proof, then show them a marking rubric and ask them to mark their own proof. Compare against a normal marker's marking. Are the students' marks fair and reliable at all?

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In reply to @christianp

Has anyone done this before? I've seen peer grading, but can't remember seeing self-marking for mathematical proofs. I reckon it's probably been done, though.
@sangwinc ?

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In reply to @heavymetalmaths

@heavymetalmaths That's a much posher cover than the one on my copy!

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@chadtopaz I'd like that on a t-shirt (on the back, obv)

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What tool should I be using for this job?
I'm conducting a survey of things, to compare with each other. For each thing, I record a name and some arbitrary notes, then I have a long list of yes/no questions to answer.
(1/n)

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In reply to @christianp

For a given set of answers to some of the questions, I'd like to be able to quickly see which things match. Additionally, some questions only make sense if the answer to another question was 'yes', so I'd like not to see them for things where the answer is 'no'.
(2/n)

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In reply to @christianp

At the moment, I've got a spreadsheet. I don't think I can do the grouping easily, and it's hard to store and read long passages of text for the notes.
In the 90s, I'd consider using something like Access. Can a diagramming tool like Miro do the automatic grouping?

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In reply to @christianp

The other option I can think of is to have a load of pieces of paper that I shuffle about, but:
1) I want a tidy desk
2) this feels like the one job that computers were invented for.

All suggestions welcome!
(4/4)

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In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect thanks! I've heard of airtable but never used it. I'll give it a go

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Airtable looks like exactly what I want - airtable.com twitter.com/aperfect/statu…

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2 4 6 8 10
7 9 1 3 5
Does this bother anyone else?

(Fisher-Price piggy bank)

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Do we know about dot products for the purpose of this proof?

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In reply to @CNUMathDept

@CNUMathDept yeah, but
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10
would do the same and trouble me much less

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Here's what I think is an OK proof. It took me a bit of thinking, and you'll note this is a day after I first saw your tweet! But I don't think it's obtuse. I can remember seeing a problem like this in the past that made thinking in vectors 'click' for me.
youtube.com/watch?v=qXPjUU…

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In reply to @christianp

@DavidKButlerUoA I can't immediately think of a way of proving it without vectors, by the way. It's just what you're familiar with, I reckon

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In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc oh dear!

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There's a live feed of bus locations?
So it's possible that I could get my pen plotter to draw out the route of a bus on a map, as it follows it.
Must resist temptation to get sidetracked on a work day twitter.com/NewcastleCC/st…

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @Whitehughes in your video it felt like you spent ages not noticing that you had an equation for MC that you could rearrange.
I think my internal monologue looks for paths between two points, and then you write down the path as a sum of the vectors along it.

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @DavidKButlerUoA I think you have in spirit the same solution as me. I spent most of my time unsure if I could expand out the dot product, and then wondering where I'd used the isosceles property before remembering a.a = |a|², so I need |a| = |b| (I first had a.a = 1)

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @Whitehughes I won't lie, I tried them all!

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do I know anyone with a Wolfram Alpha pro account who could show me what the problem generator looks like? wolframalpha.com/pro/problem-ge…

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton you paid 12×£6.50?!

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton golly! Thank you very much!
Could you do a quick screen recording of picking a question to answer, and answering it?

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton thank you very much! Hopefully you can make use of the Pro account for other purposes

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton would you mind having a go at something a bit harder?

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @Whitehughes I had a strong sense while going through my solution that I was really just repeating a similar example I'd seen before. I tried to mention the points where I'd made a decision or needed to check something, but I definitely skipped explaining some bits

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In reply to @christianp

@DavidKButlerUoA @Whitehughes I suppose mathematical fluency is having that stock of stuff you use without really thinking about it

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett how are you delivering your coursebuilder stuff to students? Do you just upload it to some webspace? Do you do anything to control access?

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett yes please! Actually, are you free now to join a zoom call?

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton Thanks, that's really helpful!

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @Whitehughes I agree, but given that exams exist, my perspective is that producing a proof demonstrates fluency, which is what you want students to end up with. It's a high bar to clear, so in a large general service course it shouldn't make up too much of the available credit

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In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton Ooh, now I'd be very interested in seeing what trouble you had

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In reply to @ChrisMaslanka

@ChrisMaslanka what's the essential feature it misses?

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In reply to @Smylers2

@Smylers2 I first saw touch screens in 2012ish, I think.

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Three video calls already today, and it's not even 10am. The baby woke up at 4, as well. Can I go to sleep now?

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I keep a collection of ambiguities and oddities in mathematical notation at whystartat.xyz/wiki/Main_Page.
Are there any unresolved ambiguities in the standard style of drawing geometrical diagrams?
(is there a standard style of drawing geometrical diagrams?)

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner Ooh, good ones!

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett Feels like #dimensionchat

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In reply to @pogonomaths

@pogonomaths Congratulations!

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In reply to @KyrallTheGreat

@KyrallTheGreat @kyledevans Yes, I came here to say it definitely doesn't contain 80085

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In reply to @JM_Field5

@JM_Field5 What's it called?

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In reply to @JM_Field5

@JM_Field5 I imagine that was commissioned immediately after they came up with the title!

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The pseudorhomicuboctahedron can never be an Archimedean solid.
RT if you agree

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In reply to @christianp

Quite cross that I've just noticed the missing b.
It's pseudorhombicuboctahedron.
#ThanksHamlet

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Just realised that if @BigMathsJam is going ahead in a couple of weeks then I need to do that thing I was planning on doing

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In reply to @HughPumphrey

@HughPumphrey That page is going straight in read.somethingorotherwhatever.com, thank you!

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In reply to @christianp

Update: the maths part of the thing is done. If anyone fancies doing a bit of illustration, I'd appreciate the help! Otherwise I have to brush up on my brushwork @Ayliean @Andrew_Taylor @hanaayoob

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In reply to @wtgowers

@wtgowers @RichardElwes I think Richard was saying if you loosen the definition of one class, why not loosen definitions of others, like the platonic solids?

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In reply to @BofingerDavid

@BofingerDavid Look at the top and bottom thirds. In 'not you', a triangle is above a square. In the other one, a triangle is above a triangle

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In reply to @BofingerDavid

@BofingerDavid For the pseudorhombicuboctahedron ('not you'), there's no combination of rotations and reflections that moves a top triangle exactly to where a bottom triangle was

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Absolutely

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In reply to @christianp

@icecolbeveridge Examples of other hard-to-pronounce functions welcome. ln is the first one I thought of

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge From my etymological dictionary:

Camel: erfc 'orse

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Inspired by @mrsouthernmaths and @icecolbeveridge, a new page on my wiki of mathematical notation oddities - "Functions with no standard pronunciation"
whystartat.xyz/wiki/Functions…
If you think of more, please add them!

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In reply to @christianp

@mrsouthernmaths @icecolbeveridge and why not: Symbols with no standard pronunciation whystartat.xyz/wiki/Symbols_w…

I reckon there are loads of these

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge That is an excellent example

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In reply to @christianp

@icecolbeveridge I think I'd fall back on 'twiddle'

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In reply to @TeacherBowTie

@TeacherBowTie Yes!

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl Somewhere there is a manufacturer's slide deck full of how intuitive those are and what an advance it is for salt lid technology

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway @SeatonDelavalNT Ahh, you must have driven past my house!

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In reply to @ForumBooks

@ForumBooks do you have Armando Iannucci's "Pandemonium" in stock at The Bound? Just had a last minute present idea!

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setting my out of office message twitter.com/UCUequality/st…

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @QAAtweets Very much rather you than me, but well done!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall @SparksMaths @tessmaths can I interest either of you in noticing that the × symbol is just the + sign, rotated?

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In reply to @christianp

@edsouthall @SparksMaths @tessmaths I don't know about you, but I think that the + symbol should be longer than ×

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In reply to @ForumBooks

@ForumBooks Just been in and bought it 👍

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl I'm responsible for the online assessment where I work. Every now and then I see a student who keeps coming back to the same homework to get 100%, and I so want to email them and tell them to look out the window.
But hey, maybe stage 1 calculus is like sudoku to them

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It's all well and good saying we have to raise the next generation of problem solvers, but I just told my one-year-old that it's too early to go outside, so he went to the kitchen bin and mimed taking it out

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Falsehoods programmers believe about content management systems: people will only type real locations in the location field.

Hence this page for a zoom meeting, showing a map centred on a business called "Zoom Online" in Montpellier: cpd.web.ucu.org.uk/events/regiona…

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Checking my router's status page for the connection speed I should be getting seems to have embarrassed this file into downloading faster

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett I think that a real-world problem motivating a new area of maths feels like the natural way for things to go, so we wouldn't even notice it

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Search for number facts sites without searching for number facts sites

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Is there a one-word name for when you give an angle in degrees, minutes and seconds?

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In reply to @pippinsboss

@pippinsboss I'll inform the surveying lecturers

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omg I've come up with a new permutation of the integers that isn't in the OEIS! 🤩🤩🤩

... ah, rats, I'm just off by 1

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Me too! See you there! twitter.com/peterrowlett/s…

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In reply to @TimFooler

@TimFooler Thanks! So if I said to write "a sexagesimal angle", you'd know what to do?

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In reply to @aap03102

@aap03102 @EulersNephew @MarkChubb3 Thanks for the kind words!

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In reply to @preetster

@preetster I saw this recently twitter.com/missradders/st…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett extra credit question: what's the probability this question was written in the USA, where there are only 6 different coins (or 5 if you exclude the $1, which you rarely see)?

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @HilariousCow

@HilariousCow Brings back memories of that Microsoft sidewinder controller, and Motocross Madness

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The masons have got a sign outside their lodge saying "new members welcome". I didn't think that was how it worked

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In reply to @Andrew_Taylor

@Andrew_Taylor @Ayliean @hanaayoob Sorry! I've just remembered I never replied to this! It's a bit late on now, but do I have your email address?

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In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees how do you feel about white text on dark bg vs black text on light bg?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @AndrewHolding

@AndrewHolding @d_yellowlees I'm having trouble imagining that not searing my eyes, but I'm colourblind. Can you give an example?

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In reply to @AndrewHolding

@AndrewHolding @d_yellowlees wowww! I consider myself lucky never to have encountered that.
It was that kind of received wisdom that I wanted to check I wasn't blindly following with white text on black

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In reply to @rarh3

@rarh3 @d_yellowlees @SparksMaths Here's a shot of @d_yellowlees' last in-person talk

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Europeans! You use a comma for the decimal separator, like π = 3,14159... which is FINE.

But what do you do for functions of more than one variable?

Like: f(x,t) = t(1,23, 4,56) ???

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In reply to @BarbaraFantechi

@BarbaraFantechi So you'd use a comma unless there's a non-integer number as one of the parameters?

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In reply to @villares

@villares Always, or just when a comma would cause a problem?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

So far, the answers here are much more consistent with each other than on mastodon: mathstodon.xyz/@christianp/10…

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In reply to @evamirandag

@evamirandag I like the way you think

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In reply to @BarbaraFantechi

@BarbaraFantechi I knew when I wrote it that pedantry was coming! Yes, a number with a comma

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@MiaMathsTeacher @pippinsboss You have problems either way in the UK: before everyone typed on compiter keybowrds, • was very common for the decimal separator

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@MiaMathsTeacher @pippinsboss Yes, but also in old-fashioned typesetting.

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@MiaMathsTeacher Yeah, I think South Africans too. Switzerland and India have fun notation!

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In reply to @HilariousCow

@HilariousCow FYI you need to add both the acronym and its plural to your muted words list, because apparently just the singular wasn't enough to stop me seeing this tweet!

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In reply to @japhethwood

@japhethwood There's @NclNumbas. Runs in the browser, so no server setup; explore mode makes good formative stuff. But if you're looking for a curated library of material... well, we're working on it.

1 favourite 0 retweets

That's quite a thing for Outlook to log me out in the middle of writing an email!

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In reply to @modeltheorist

@modeltheorist There's a bread baking season?!

Fab crunch on that loaf

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @modeltheorist

@modeltheorist not a problem I've noticed at this latitude

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @egimich

@egimich I've replied "I'd like to, but I can't attend at that time" quite a few times lately, so the problem hasn't completely gone away

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"an invite". "a meet".
What other verbs with existing noun forms are we using in the imperative form for instead these days?

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In reply to @christianp

(to be clear, I don't include myself in the "we" in the above)

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @miclugo *daft punk noises*

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In reply to @christianp

So many examples! There's got to be a name for this.

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This question immediately occurred to me on looking at this graph: is NHS spending now what it would have been if the annual rise had been constant at the dotted line since 1949? twitter.com/_Jimbo76/statu…

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In reply to @christianp

no alt text on the graph in that quoted tweet, so: a chart showing average annual rise in government spending above inflation, 1949-2019. Five rectangles spanning 1949-1979, 1979-1997, 1997-201, 2010-2015, 2015-2019, and a dotted line just under 4%. (1/2)

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In reply to @christianp

Dotted line labelled "average 1949-2019". The first two blocks are slightly under the dotted line; 1997-2010 is considerably higher; the final two blocks are considerably lower

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I'm practising my @BigMathsJam talk right now for the next ~10 minutes in the Gather space, in case anyone's interested

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This morning, head on the floor and bum in the air, I achieved enlightenment when I realised that yoga is stimming for neurotypical people

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An impromptu mathematical art installation to appear behind me during my @BigMathsJam talk

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In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA If you run one lap of the course and then run the same route backwards, how many laps have you run?

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson Servo animation, you say? I'm interested!

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared "Did it bite your arm off?"
"No, just a nip"

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A little thread about an extremely simple web-based slideshow I made for my @BigMathsJam talk yesterday.
You can see it at somethingorotherwhatever.com/each-edge-peac…
I wanted to show a little bit of text next to a graphic that changes on each slide.

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In reply to @christianp

reveal.js is 10 years old now, and the way it works has changed a bit to keep up with new stuff in browsers. So each time I make a presentation, I have to decide if I'm going to update reveal.js, and see if it's got a way of doing something I had to hack in before

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In reply to @christianp

For years I've been using reveal.js for presentations, because I do _not_ get on with powerpoint, and I often want to embed web stuff. It's really good, but there's always a point where I get frustrated trying to lay stuff out.

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In reply to @christianp

What do you do when you don't understand how a complicated bit of software works? Write your own copy from scratch!
Then you have only yourself to blame.

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In reply to @christianp

My solution lately has been to use CSS display: grid on slides, because I know how to centre stuff and share out space in a fairly straightforward manner.
But it's always a faff, and reveal.js is now so big I spend a lot of time trying to understand how it works

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In reply to @christianp

I came up with something very simple: each slide is a <section> tag, styled to 100vh height and laid out vertically, so you only see one at a time. They have tabindex="0" so you move between them by pressing Tab.

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In reply to @christianp

The thing that got me this time was having the same graphic displayed on a range of slides, and updating it depending on which slide is shown. I spent a couple of hours fiddling with reveal.js's events API before giving up.

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In reply to @christianp

To update the graphic, I added a 'focus' event listener to each <section> tag, calling a function 'update_graph' with the index of the tag among its siblings.

That's it! It worked brilliantly.

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In reply to @christianp

I was expecting to have to write a thing to call scrollIntoView on the next slide, but Firefox automatically scrolls an element into view when you focus it, so I got the fundamentals of a slideshow without any JS!

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In reply to @christianp

This time, there were no links or interactive bits in the slides that people might want to access on their own, do I just needed it to work for me during the presentation.

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In reply to @christianp

I think for a set of slides I want other people to be able to use, it'd need more stuff: at the moment it only knows which slide is shown from focus events, but it should really pay attention to scrolling too.

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In reply to @christianp

Anyway, I'm not going to make any effort to share this system for other people to make presentations with.
The point is that it's idiosyncratic, a product of exactly the things I know how to do and don't know how to do.

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl I think the answer is to have 8 hours of sleep, but I get the feeling that's not the answer you want

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In reply to @pwr2dppl

@pwr2dppl I hope you're sleep-tweeting, because you should be asleep right now

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In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK this plan is regressive though: poor people lose way more of their inheritable wealth than rich people

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @BigMathsJam I'm sad I didn't get to chat to you at big mathsjam. I wasn't around for much of the non-talk time.
Let's bump into each other virtually soon!

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle the livestream broke during your talk yesterday. I have a backup recording of my screen, but it turns out the audio is just of my mic, so there's lots of typing noise on top of your speech. Do you want me to put it up with the stream for 72 hours, or just forget it?

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle okie dokes!

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In reply to @Tony_Mann

@Tony_Mann the livestream broke during your talk yesterday. I have a backup recording of my screen, but it turns out the audio is just of my mic, so there's lots of typing noise on top of your speech. Do you want me to put it up with the stream for 72 hours, or just forget it?

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In reply to @Tony_Mann

@Tony_Mann if you want a permanent recording, best to do it again, but just for the 72 hours the livestreams are available, I reckon my recording is good enough

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In reply to @christianp

thanks to @pkrautz for telling me about CSS scroll-snap, which lets me insist that you can't scroll halfway between slides. I've replaced the focus listener with a scroll listener, so this now works nicely with just scrolling!

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I have an HTML question I either don't know how to google or nobody has asked before:
I have a web-based editor for a content bank. Users can write HTML descriptions for items, which will be shown on a details page. They might want to use heading tags in their description. (1/2)

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In reply to @christianp

What should I do with heading tags so they don't mess up the page navigation when the description is embedded in a page? Shift everything down, so h1 → h3, h2 → h4, ...? Just leave them as they are? (2/2)

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In reply to @jtombs

@jtombs could do, but I feel like assuming the text will always be displayed under a certain heading level is wrong

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I don't know R, and I'm following a tutorial, so I just started installing tidyverse. It appears I'm in a TeX Live situation - just how much stuff is it installing?

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA mine gave up with inscrutable error messages after 10ish minutes

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the ineffable dignity of goats twitter.com/KevMorgans/sta…

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10 years?! twitter.com/CSH_Picone/sta…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @TeaKayB

@TeaKayB this is the kind of thing @CuttleXYZ is very good at. Here's a drawing parameterised by radius of the circle: cuttle.xyz/@christianlp/C…

1 favourite 0 retweets

Selection bias: Zoom's "how was your experience?" dialog only pops up when it *doesn't* crash in the middle of a call

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In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect that's what I ended up doing - find the top heading level in the content, and shift everything so that level matches the surrounding page

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do I know anyone who has the new Pokémon Brilliant Diamond or Shining Pearl on Switch and has got the Pokétch?
It's for a maths thing

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In reply to @lornajaggard

@lornajaggard fab!!! Would you be willing to spend some time typing things into the calculator and telling me what it produces?

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In reply to @lornajaggard

@lornajaggard super, thanks! Can you follow me so I can DM you?

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway crikey, Hallam's the place to be!

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway apparently so

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney it seems you're supposed to hang your towel on it?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo the code I'm working on this morning is currently a two-digestive problem

2 favourites 1 retweet

I've spent the morning making a floating point calculator

254 favourites 16 retweets

In reply to @henryseg

@henryseg that was my next idea!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA My immediate reaction to this "brainteaser" was that it's one of those "invent and prove the theorem I'm thinking of" ones, and it doesn't look like I was wrong!
I have a feeling @robeastaway has a name for these

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Here's how it looks now. I hadn't realised at first that the order of the inputs matters!

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In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall Elm

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In reply to @eigenbros

@eigenbros Well, both. I want to see if it's easier to use on my phone than a standard calculator, for situations where you want to repeat a calculation with different inputs

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In reply to @onio72

@onio72 Elm. I've put the code on @glitch: floating-point-calculator.glitch.me

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In reply to @howie_hua

@howie_hua This might be your best one yet

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In reply to @christianp

I've put this on @glitch at floating-point-calculator.glitch.me
It now works with touch screens. Next is to add keyboard input

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In reply to @KangarooPhysics

@KangarooPhysics @glitch Yeah, arrows would be helpful. Solving backwards is an interesting idea!

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"This is an international project, so all communication should be in English".

Best said while wearing a pith helmet

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why has rstudio registered itself as the default application for css files?!?

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In reply to @christianp

this might be why I didn't have RStudio installed

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Just discovered that on Ubuntu if you press the play media button on your keyboard after failing to pick up a MS Teams call, it plays the ringtone on loop despite there being no call any more.

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Htbaa

@Htbaa I think this is a "hastily put together an Electron app" bug rather than a linux problem

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In reply to @Htbaa

@Htbaa oddly, I wasn't motivated to find out

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Tomorrow I'm giving a maths talk to a load of 15/16 year olds. It's a talk I last gave in 2014, so I've updated it a bit.
I've put my slides online at staff.ncl.ac.uk/christian.perf….
What do you think? (Obviously you don't know what I'll say about them!)

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In reply to @christianp

The talk went really well last time, so I didn't want to change too much. One thing I'm really struck by now is that every character in the story, including me, is a white man. I'm not sure what to do about that.

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In reply to @christianp

I'll tell the kids that the story took place in a time when you pretty much had to be a well-off white man to dedicate time to maths and have me end up knowing about it.

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In reply to @PaddyMaths

@PaddyMaths Yes, I suppose quickly showing a couple of contemporary people would get that point across, even if I'm not showing any maths attributed to them

1 favourite 0 retweets

December

In reply to @christianp

For comparison, here are the slides I used in 2014: staff.ncl.ac.uk/christian.perf…

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo ƨʍᴉwƨ

Which upside-down?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @neheritagelib

@neheritagelib My parents moved to Washington ~40 years ago because they thought the metro was going there. Alas not!

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In reply to @CMoore_84

@CMoore_84 That's really nice to hear, thanks!

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Just for a laugh,
Let G be a graph,
With points called P
And edges called E.
Now draw a line
(just anywhere's fine)
And split up P,
Some for you, some me.
Now look at E,
And how it links P.
If every line
Connects yours to mine,
That graph called G?
Bipartite. QED!

25 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @RichardElwes

@RichardElwes Ahh, you're right! I tried to avoid exactly that, but clearly failed in the last iteration

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Pals, @Tegglington has just told me that in Japan they don't use ✓ for "correct", they use 〇.
What other symbols for "correct" and "incorrect" are used around the world?

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner What's in the lookup tables?

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In reply to @evelynjlamb

@evelynjlamb @yenergy Whoah, now there's an idea!

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In reply to @christianp

@evelynjlamb @yenergy though if you're looking for uses for leftover fat, look no further than British cooking

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In reply to @john_overholt

@john_overholt I did, one year

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In reply to @christianp

It now looks like this. It takes physical and on-screen keyboard input. I spent a fruitless hour trying to get pinch-to-zoom to work.

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In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge Yes, @KangarooPhysics asked for arrows too. Will do

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In reply to @christianp

@mathforge @KangarooPhysics like this?

1 favourite 0 retweets

oh wow, firefox developer tools has a tool to simulate colour vision deficiency and contrast loss! developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Too…
Very handy!

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In reply to @soupie66

@soupie66 My memory isn't great 🤷‍♂️

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Numbers can be named! I think this makes the display way easier to read

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Do you have a calculators folder on your phone? If not, why not?

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People with working colour vision who use the web-based Outlook: is the "selected email" colour easy to distinguish from the normal white background? I've just scrolled up and down my inbox half a dozen times trying to find the email I'm looking at!

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In reply to @christianp

I've set up a blank page with the left half that colour, and I honestly couldn't tell if I'd set it up properly! It all looks flat white to me.

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Naming Your Child After Irish Counties

Clare: lovely
Kerry: also fine
Mayo: audacious

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In reply to @christianp

between 1996 and 2015, the only Irish county names given to children born in the UK were:

Cavan (572)
Clare (1062)
Kerry (38)
Tyrone (1445)

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In reply to @christianp

I know many Clares and zero Cavans. Are regional averages on the primary SPaG test published, so I know where to look for them?

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In reply to @suedepom

@suedepom was it immediately clear there are two parts, or did you have to stare for a bit?

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In reply to @sxpmaths

@sxpmaths ooh, is that a thing? Thanks for the hint!

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turns out my Outlook was set to "Organisational theme", so it must be my local IT people to blame! twitter.com/sxpmaths/statu…

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In reply to @pippinsboss

@pippinsboss Interesting!

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techy South Africans: can any of you recommend a server hosting provider in SA? Either virtual or dedicated is fine, but we need a linux box we can do whatever with. (@Pyfagorass?)

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @Pyfagorass

@Pyfagorass I'd like to avoid them if possible

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In reply to @homovexedus

@homovexedus @Pyfagorass thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

thinking about how to do unary operations. Do I need a shift key for the keypad, to pick from lots of unary ops?

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In reply to @christianp

#JustZenzicThings

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron I've got a Samsung one with a twiddly knob for setting the time instead of buttons. Starts a couple of seconds after you stop moving the knob. Changed my life.

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Exciting unintended typography! Using the League of Moveable Type's Junction font, the word "office" looks like "offfice", I guess because it applies an ff ligature and then an fi ligature.

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In reply to @christianp

ack, it's doing it again!

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In reply to @christianp

and to satisfy @Htbaa's curiosity: no, it doesn't keep going after you close the app

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An unexpected logic puzzle, thanks to the baby: can you say how many lids are in the wrong place?
4-year-old said "two pens have the wrong colour lid - maybe we could get some paint and fix them"
#tmwyk

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What should I change A to so that the number at the top is an integer?
Or what should I change B to? Or C?

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron is anyone maintaining a page listing the day's scandals, like the one for Trump?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Smylers2

@Smylers2 there's a solution for B that you might call trivial. Or: nobody said B has to be an integer

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In reply to @christianp

@Smylers2 if you do want B to be an integer, then does B = (A-1)·C feel justifiable?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @tim_hunt

@tim_hunt Like, conveying the visual layout to assistive tech? I don't think there's a well-defined answer to that

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Mathematicians nationwide wild that everyone else now has to deal with the idea of vacuous truth twitter.com/davidallengree…

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In reply to @Gloryless

@Gloryless Good question. I don't know!

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In reply to @Mrs_Plucker

@Mrs_Plucker For A?

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Me: isn't it weird how people from crypto jewish families follow all sorts of traditions without any conscious reason to maintain them?

Also me: it's Friday - let's have fish!

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In reply to @christianp

The box labelled f does something to a, b and c and produces the number shown above it.
What could f be doing? Have I given you enough information?

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In reply to @ukor

@ukor Fair point. What would f do to a=2, b=3, c=4?

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In reply to @ukor

@ukor My question was deliberately ambiguous. I'm interested to see what you might think is a safe bet about how I defined f

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In reply to @colinfry666

@colinfry666 @ukor yes! Want to have a go at any other values?

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In reply to @ukor

@ukor what would f be, then?

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I want to be the cube. I want the squeezy hug twitter.com/KangarooPhysic…

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron what the devil is turmeric cauliflower? I know I'm northern, but those aren't two things I'd ever imagined would need to be packaged together

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron yeah, but like, is it a cauliflower coated in turmeric? Have they somehow interbred cauliflower and turmeric?

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Today's annoyance with our IT service's terrible support system: when writing a reply to a message from the person handling the ticket, can't see their message

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In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle *waves*

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In reply to @Pecnut

@Pecnut @mralistairgreen did you get a sticker? I've just realised that my wife got a sticker after her booster, and I didn't.

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In reply to @Pecnut

@Pecnut @mralistairgreen me neither. I consider this the greatest failing of the vaccination campaign.

PS you travelled a long way to get that jab! Any snow on the hills?

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Years and years ago, I used a command-line music player called something like Cymbelline. It tried to build a markov chain model to decide which song to play next, based on when you skipped songs.
I can't find any trace of it. Does anyone else remember it?

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In reply to @sxpmaths

@sxpmaths thanks, but I don't think that's it

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In reply to @christianp

found it! It was called cymbaline: web.archive.org/web/2007121722…

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I don't know what it says about me that my reaction to this cartoon was to wonder about the elf pay scale, whether "Head", "Chief" and "Lead" signify different points on it, and the politics leading to who gets which twitter.com/tomgauld/statu…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @statto

@statto @NHSX @NHSuk reminds me of the "oesophagoose" public health campaign up here - nogu.org.uk
You were supposed to see that written on the side of a bus, then type it in to google. They've stuck with it much longer than I expected!

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degenerate memes club 2022

tag yourself i'm

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icosahedronandonandon twitter.com/HedronApp/stat…

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in database index hell

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In reply to @christianp

emerged from database index hell by working out how to rewrite a join as a subquery.

NOT TODAY, CATEGORY THEORY!

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo maybe it's sitting in a warehouse past customs, so not in the political UK any more, but still in the geographic UK?

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo it feels like one of those cases where both sides would be better off if it was a bit more opaque

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Me, earlier: eugh, so many Christmas cards to make! I know: I'll get the pen plotter to do it!

Me, several hours later: the plotter has drawn two cards, of which one is acceptable

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In reply to @christianp

90 minutes later, I have 8 cards. 15 minutes per card isn't too bad, right? 🤷‍♂️

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett "buying more money" isn't a bad description of what banks do

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In reply to @matthras

@matthras I had a real "Oh hey, it's the guy! From the other place!" moment when I saw you there.

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Here's a @wacnt problem that this tweet inspired: smallest n such that n! has two zeros immediately after the leading digit twitter.com/NewtonInstitut…

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In reply to @JonathanHoefler

@JonathanHoefler I'm autistic so they say I'm lacking mirror neurons to understand other people's perspectives, but when people send me files with my name on, I have serious doubts about which way round it goes!

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2021 Christmas decor

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In reply to @christianp

(I'm happy to report they're all negative)

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston @Sheena2907 how long does your shower take to warm up?! Do I have new boiler privilege?

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In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall @panlepan @TimBrzezinski @MathTechCoach @geogebra The classic trick in other languages is to define two functions: one that returns the first item in each pair, and one that returns the second. Can you do that in Geogebra?

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In reply to @Pecnut

@Pecnut The steel band Christmas songs! Terrible episode though

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I have five stacks of three blocks. I can join two stacks together, or split a stack.
How many splits and joins do I need to do to end up with three stacks of five blocks?

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In reply to @christianp

My real question is: for A stacks of B blocks into B stacks of A blocks, is it ever the case that the strategy that minimises joins is not the same as the strategy that minimises splits?

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In reply to @eduardojdiniz

@eduardojdiniz Yes - to go backwards, swap splits and joins

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue (proof left to the reader)

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue I think you got the + and - the wrong way round, but I got the idea

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In reply to @jiyameng

@jiyameng Interesting! But some rearranging is allowed, too

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In reply to @gotai1234

@gotai1234 Congratulations!

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Privileged to be at the début performance of my son's new dance drama, "Every Second Without Chocolate Causes Me Physical Pain"

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner What are you doing to them?!

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In reply to @ch_nira

@ch_nira @IMAmaths • run the big Math-Off 2022

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In reply to @Shona_Mu

@Shona_Mu Are you into puzzle games? Something easy that you can just crack on with

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Considered adding some of my personal weirdnesses to my profile bio for visibility, but realised there might be too many to fit:
Autistic, dyspraxic, colour blind, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos.
Is it worth listing things like that? Feels odd. What should the bio contain?

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway I read "After Eight Variants" as a title in a similar format to "Twenty Eight Days Later"

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson That was THIS YEAR?!?!