Tweets from 2022

The biggest tragedy of 2021 is that I finished my last tube of Signal toothpaste, and now there are no more.

Anyone else who abhors mint: what kind of toothpaste do you use?

@ch_nira @JJrhule1 Congratulations!

@soupie66 Yeuch! Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm a right awkward one

Happy new year! If you're the kind of person that other people ask "is there anything mathematical about this number?", you might find this useful: a 78-page collection of maths facts about 2022, by Inder J Taneja
zenodo.org/record/5805264…

@algebrandis I was just about to reply to your other tweet, saying elmo's pronouns are elmo/elmo

Is there a "Sanitiser stations of the National Trust" account?

@DavidKButlerUoA Yes, I think gather would be perfect for it

@elinoroberts Ooh, good idea!

@C_J_Smith And on a patterned surface!

Wild about my sciatica flaring up the night before I go back to work. I can barely straighten my back, let alone sit in a chair and code for 8 hours

@Smylers2 Mrs L-P found another tube of Signal in the travelling bag, so the pressure is off for a little bit longer

@josstified Which programme was this?

@josstified thanks! Responding to this might make a good blog post. I might ignore my to-do list long enough to write it!

SSHing into the PC less than 2m away from me so that I don't have to move my knackered back from this position

Extremely pleased to finally make some progress with ambiguous `|` symbols in my Asciimath parser: github.com/christianp/asc…

@drvinceknight I think the best thing about Paw Patrol is how consistently they forgive Mayor Humdinger

@howie_hua I don't dare look up when that song came out to see if only old people will get this

@AnonMathMom Yesterday my brother in law dropped the firstborn's massive new Christmas lego set and it shattered on the floor. Nobody stepped on any bricks, but he was certainly treading on eggshells for the rest of the day!

@Pyfagorass that is glorious!

@Pyfagorass that's very kind, but no need

A colleague has misspelt their own name when creating an account on a system I'm in charge of, and not noticed for several years.
Should I fix it? Now I've seen it I can't stop thinking about it

@Pyfagorass you have my blessing to call this "isthisprime.com: the scroll"

@stecks @clopenmic that pun!

@sangwinc nothing. It's so tempting!

I'm writing documentation for my diagram-drawing tools today, so this tweet by @wtgowers inspired me to draw the diagram he's talking about!

twitter.com/wtgowers/statu…

@wtgowers here's the Numbas Eukleides code I wrote to produce the diagram: gist.github.com/christianp/278…
It's too complicated because I decided to get all the coords by rotation, instead of just typing them in, and the JME Eukleides extension could do with more convenient syntax

@DavidKButlerUoA @yudhi_bunjamin @howie_hua and I played another game, but I think we tidied up our pieces afterwards like nice boys 😁
I like Imparium - it felt like a less drudgy version of Boxes.
Thanks for hosting the session - it was nice to finally talk to you live!

@d_yellowlees It might just be because I'm really clumsy, but I've never got on with the "sea of post it's" approach. I typically stick a load of stuff on an A4 sheet, and draw arrows for the order I think they should go in

@DavidKButlerUoA So just stop saying things are easy! Simple!

@kyledevans I got the same. Do some schools do prep for maths challenge? We were just given it one day. (or I didn't realise when we did the prep!)

Thinking today about how I rely on the frequent, accurate stats on covid cases to determine what's safe to do, and how the government could easily make them less frequent and less accurate

humanity's working title was "Technical Debt: The Species"

"We'll think about bloodflow later, the spec says we need massive brains"

"No time to think about back pain now, Sales says we need huge mammaries"

"Tell engineering they'll just have to compromise on childbirth, head office wants bipedal motion"

"We need to cover large distances on flat ground, so just swing that big toe round to the front with the others"

Flashback to 2011, shortly before I quit my PhD.

In fact, it was the Grzegorczyk hierarchy stuff that was the final straw

Some people made the very good point that your bio should say what you tweet about, so I've had a go at that. Now it goes:

"Disabled mathematician & koala fan. I make computers do maths, overthink notation, blog at @aperiodical. Notably terse.
mathstodon.xyz/@christianp. He/him"

(I really do struggle to use words earnestly)

At @DavidKButlerUoA's One Hundred Factorial last week, I played a nice space-claiming game.
I was inspired to make a computery version. I've called it "This island is big enough for the both of us"
Play at somethingorotherwhatever.com/this-island-is…

@DrCaroSummers this might not be news to you, but just in case: my life has changed since I found out about the compose key on linux. It's so much easier than alt codes! e.g. ö is
Compose " o
Apparently macs do something similar

@DavidKButlerUoA the source code is at github.com/christianp/thi… if you're interested

@harald_bohr @mathhombre it absolutely is! The first example I thought of is viewers for the Mandelbrot set; here's the first one that Google returned: observablehq.com/@jashkenas/the…

Do I know any mathematicians who use British Sign Language?
I'd like to put together an event with some training on basic BSL for maths, and maybe one or two talks about doing maths while Deaf/deaf.

@DrJessBoland you did some nice videos of mathsy/sciencey signs a few years ago; are you able to do some training or give a talk to do with maths BSL, or can you recommend someone else?

@DrJessBoland (I have a budget, obv)

I've realised that I don't know what this shape looks like. I will tweet first, make a guess, then do some simulations.

You launch a projectile into the air. If you only know the launch angle and speed roughly, where could it be after T seconds?

My thoughts:

T=0: at the origin.
T→∞: An interval around a point on the ground.
Other T: something like an ellipse, maybe squashed against the ground. I don't think it has to be convex.

@BernhardWerner yes!

I've made a @geogebra worksheet. Point A is the position of the projectile, and B controls the launch angle and speed. I've turned on trace for both.
When B traces a square, A traces a windscreen wiper shape. Makes sense!

Here's the geogebra worksheet: geogebra.org/calculator/gfg…

I couldn't be bothered to work out how to repeat the calculation over many points in geogebra, so here's a video from a different tool, showing a smattering of points over time. I wasn't sure before seeing this whether the shape changes before and after the top of the parabola

@beefok @geogebra I have the equations of motion memorised from the mechanics module at school!

@beefok @geogebra Or, let's be realistic, from making millions of physicsy games in blitz basic

@deafdragongirl @MiaowPR yes, I'd like a qualified person to deliver training, but I specifically want someone with experience of maths vocabulary.

@maths_kath @aperiodical cool! Can you remember any of them?

"OCR offers a Further Maths A Level option ‘Further Pure with Technology’ in which learners can use a computer algebra system, spreadsheets, and graph plotters in the exam"
I need to look this up!!

cambridgeassessment.org.uk/blogs/high-sta…

@deafdragongirl @MiaowPR thanks!

@MitchKeller @aperiodical cool. Is she still working?

@MitchKeller @aperiodical "hear no evil", eh?

@VickyMaths1729 @aperiodical @ScottishSensory I knew but had forgotten. Thanks!

I'm having a nice evening looking at the tutorials for @UsePenrose - penrose.gitbook.io/penrose/
It makes a lot more sense than last time I looked at it!

@UsePenrose is there a way to suggest changes to the gitbook? I think there are a couple of errors in penrose.gitbook.io/penrose/tutori…, maybe using an old version of the dsl grammar?

@UsePenrose I clicked on the second link, "Penrose tutorial", on github.com/penrose/penros…. What should I be reading instead?

@JDHamkins @katemath 0: first
1: second
2: twird
3: third

@honeypisquared Colour coding

@honeypisquared by which I mean, do less of that! Just realised this was ambiguous!

@UsePenrose I'm doing that, but what's in that branch doesn't seem to match what's on gitbook. The gitbook version seems to have some typos fixed, so is it newer?

What's the deal with French academia and 1998-level webpages? The ghost of minitel?

@kisonecat @ShriramKMurthi @_julesh_ can you explain how you use the Canvas API? Just to upload files to the Files area?
I've tried something similar, but I'd love to be able to do something like rsync a local folder with one in Canvas

A really common trick in video is to show clouds in timelapse, and you can really appreciate how they change over time.

I'd really like to see a (simulated) timelapse of a landscape over decades, so you can see tress popping in and out of existence. Does that exist?

@bluecombats thanks! Lots of popping out, not so much popping in, alas!

@kisonecat @ShriramKMurthi @_julesh_ thanks!
I've got lots of more important things to do at the moment, so... yes, I'll have a go at that now!

@pwr2dppl I've noticed very few jokes about script writers in films

@kitwallace that's almost exactly what I had in mind. Thanks!

ahhh, rats. A confirmed covid case in my daughter's class, the day before my birthday!

Dreary work tweet alert!

I've written a Python script to synchronise a folder on your PC with a Canvas LMS course's files section.

pypi.org/project/canvas…

Thanks to @ShriramKMurthi and @kisonecat for nerdsniping me: twitter.com/kisonecat/stat…

This is the first time I've published a Python package on PyPI. It was surprisingly straightforward!

Outlook: It Sort Of Works™

video description:
Typing an email:

Some clever person at MS: look, I made it superscript ordinals automatically! 1st place for me!

Me: Cool, my next conference is on the 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th and 14th of June.

Wait...

(10th, 11th, 12th and 13th are not superscripted)

@walkymatt you'd better believe they're superscripted!

@htfb I'm using the web version. I can believe the desktop version works better

@BernhardWerner if you write a SMILES parser, I'd love to see it! Our chemists have been asking for that in Numbas for ages

@BernhardWerner I was astonished when I looked at this at just how much of the "standard" nomenclature is proprietary. There are algorithms to work out the structure of a molecule from its IUPAC name, but they're not open

Dealing with y'a qu'a, faut qu'on attitude again

@UsePenrose I think I'm starting to get my head round how @UsePenrose works. Here's something like a family tree 🤷

I wonder if you can do any logic in the 'where' clauses; I've felt like I want some NOT and OR ops a few times

@UsePenrose Is there something like a sameSide(a, b, c) objective, to ensure c isn't between a and b?

Merry Christiansmas, one and all!
V pleased with this jumper from Mrs L-P

@honeypisquared @GeeknProud42 Is this talk recorded?

@marcoreggiani_ @honeypisquared @GeeknProud42 OK, thanks

@alephJamesA nice slides, lovely pictures.
I would remove the word "obvious" from where you've used it

@benjamindickman @arsinoepi @pwr2dppl de Rham-parts

@C_J_Smith I watched that one yesterday! Have they just added it to Netflix?

@C_J_Smith BRB, putting together a conference proposal, "Offering students an exam paper on a completely different subject to the one taught: one assessment innovation too far?"

Those mattresses that get delivered with all the air squashed out of them: why don't we have this technology for bread yet?

@jjsanderson Outrageous levels of self-assembly

Baby Jake on Cbeebies: someone watched a Cyriak animation and said "my baby would love that!"

@nthpijots See twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@eduardojdiniz we don't have Pillsbury here. We have Jus-Rol, which I think is similar, but they only do pastry. I had no idea Pillsbury had tried it with bread!

@peterrowlett @jjaron Yeah, up until this month they've always arrived the next day for us

@NTCouncilTeam Snap! I just came downstairs to find my two waving at the bin men.

@nclroblib what a line! If I'd written that I'd put my pen down and go for a victory lap

Empty brain: not documenting your code.

Full brain: documenting your code after you write

Galaxy brain: documenting code you haven't written yet

(today I am submitting lots of bug reports saying "why does thing mentioned in the docs not actually exist?)

A fantastic bit of maths writing twitter.com/ToposInstitute…

@DavidKButlerUoA It so effectively conveyed the feeling of enjoying doing maths. The analogies are great. It didn't really explain what the object Poly is in a way I can use, but that doesn't matter, because that'd be impossible in such a short piece. I want to look it up now

@DavidKButlerUoA Also fantastic in the literal 'this is from a fantasy' sense

Have introduced the four-year-old to the Wiggles. Was this a mistake

@matthras I don't know if you know this, but we can't get Peppa Pig in our house, only at grandma's.
It's a mystery 🤷‍♂️

That feeling when you model compassionate response to a student in an email with a colleague CCed in, and then you see the colleague doing the same in an email to another student 🥰

WHAT IS THE DEAL with Tories and pigs??

I'd say 16 months is too young to sarcastically copy your sibling's crying.
#SubtweetingMyKids

@honeypisquared that's a really good point. Does that symbol appear in the syllabus? I'm not sure which of "careless use" and "inexplicably precise syllabus" I'd go for as the most likely explanation

got Kier Sptarmigan stuck in my head, can't get it out

why are the headshots on Labour's shadow cabinet page cropped so weirdly?
labour.org.uk/people/shadow-…

just looking for a username for a test account to replace Tester Jowell, don't mind me

@bbarber_ Tories can't claim scalps if we haven't got any

I refuse to believe that this code is running properly first time!
I know that @elmlang ensure it won't compile unless the types match, but I'm doing a lot of angle arithmetic too.
Time to make an offering to St Debug

@pwr2dppl That advice: Considering leaving academia? Think about LinkedIn. Now you want to stay in academia. You're welcome.

I've made a new game, about holding hands.
The hard part: some of these fellas have lots of hands!

JIGGRAPH: somethingorotherwhatever.com/jiggraph/

@roger_mansuy @mickaellaunay @3615Robin @LaureCornu1 @Apmep_Nat @Alice8076 @FibreTigre @InHenriPoincare @CultureMath @MMI_lyon @LeMyriogon @Klomoon @litteramath @LesMathsEnScene Est-ce que vouz avez vu la présentation de @jamesgrime sur une version anglaise de ce livre? Le diaporama est à mathsjam.com/assets/talks/2…

Compression stockings, day 1: I can't believe what a difference they've made! I haven't lost my vision once, and this morning I hoovered both upstairs and down without collapsing.
Can't shake the feeling I'm in Rocky Horror though

@b0rk I do this too! Apart from anything else, I decided the headache of learning how to set up nginx is much less than the headache of moving all my stuff if github pages or netlify or whatever become unusable

@b0rk I think there's an unfinished sentence in the rsync section: " I think this was because ."

@b0rk thanks! And that sentence now explains why I hadn't seen the same problem - I wondered if I was doing rsync wrong

I want this on a tea towel! twitter.com/GaloAndStuff/s…

Let's do this again!
Going to sleep now - will reply with fun maths in the morning twitter.com/christianp/sta…

Water,
Life-giving water!

Miracle molecule,
Medium of all that matters

Seeping through my ceiling

Helping mould grow

Annoying me

@jjsanderson it's all right, a chap with a telescopic scrubbing brush and a tub of biocide is coming to sort it out

@lunasorcery I had this but with a github profile recently. Took me a minute to put the pieces together, but I was happy for her when I did!

why is the Santander android banking app 677mb??? The Nationwide app is 52mb

@JanvierUK well, having kids does drastically change your life, but it's defo true that some people use it inappropriately as a source of authority in arguments

@PaulsPrattle the vast majority is "user data". Maybe it's saving statement PDFs every month, even if I don't look at them?

@PaulsPrattle yeah, in fact I don't think it's that - I went into the app, and when I clicked to view statements, it opened a separate browser

can't think of a more succinct way of doing this

@howie_hua It's possible to go off a person, you know

@DavidKButlerUoA When you're finished, I'd like to know if this is the point at which you felt confident you're on the path to the solution

@DavidKButlerUoA Interesting! Maybe I got lucky with my line of thought then.
Since those triangles are right-angled and congruent, I thought you can make a rectangle from two of them. From there I was confident I'd have everything I needed after writing down the rectangle's area

@DavidKButlerUoA Sides of the rectangle are cos(x) and sin(x).
Its area is 1/4.
So sin(x)cos(x) =1/4.
Doible angle formula: sin(2x)=2sin(x)cos(x)
So sin(2x)=1/2.
Used a calculator to find x=15°

@DavidKButlerUoA Bits I used from memory:
When you have right-angled triangles, try making a whole rectangle.
sin(x)cos(x) has something to do with double angle formulas (had to look up if it was sin or cos)
Couldn't be bothered to work out arcsin(1/2), so used a calculator

@DavidKButlerUoA Exactly!

@DrCaroSummers "Delivering a baby" SCORM package in the staff VLE

Going through my old stuff. Apparently in 2008 I was making this sort of rubbish.
somethingorotherwhatever.com/cards/

@Benjaming_G @georgemsavva mrange

@standupmaths youtube.com/watch?v=r6FVk2…

@htfb @Nadine_Writes what's the ratio for all Black pupils?

This morning's coding practice was making a game where you have to FIND DRACULA.
somethingorotherwhatever.com/find-dracula/
(don't call it a Wordle clone)

People who have run conferences over gather.town: what kind of info and preparation do you give attendees beforehand?

@moebio is each step a different kind of shuffle?

@heavymetalmaths would you have a moment to show me them some time?

@robinhouston congratulations!

@Smylers2 there's so much stuff that I've watched back and realised: pop culture in the 90s was Extremely Horny

does this look reasonable? (sorry, screen reader users - skip now!)
🦇🚪🧛🚪🚪
🚪⚰️🚪🧛🦇
🦇🚪🧛⚰️🚪
🦇⚰️🚪🧛🚪
🚪⚰️🚪🚪⚰️

Has anyone run this through Turnitin? twitter.com/AdamBienkov/st…

@TyneTom @NTyneLivingSt Oh yes, I used to dread crossing there when I lived in tynemouth!

Fascinating! twitter.com/abbott567/stat…

🤞 hexadecimal episode twitter.com/numberblocks/s…

@honeypisquared I can't see the colours, but those are lovely icons!

@honeypisquared don't be sorry - they all look different, and I can read all the text, so they work for me!

This conference registration form's single-line "accessibility requirements" field is optimistic!
Maybe I'll write a document and just put a link to it.

@zithral Can you make table of which tin each mix will go into? I'm colourblind so never learnt!

@zithral The model I imagine is: colours are triples (r, y, b), with white = (1,1,1). Mixing colours is taking the minimum of each component.
Is that what you thought?

rang a call centre and got through instantly. Unprecedented! I wasn't ready to actually talk!

@jtombs Should've thought of that!

@jjsanderson Oh no! Hope that's the extent of it.
Might be joining you soon - PLP has a persistent cough so we're waiting for a PCR result...

@jjsanderson @gwydionuk We've had a bucket of negative LFTs. Either we're doing it wrong, or we all have sneaky nasal tracts

The pair of curves that you draw to show a shape has a hole needs a name. Has anyone given it a name?

@SamHartburn I can see it, but I don't like it

@honeypisquared @SamHartburn Ooh, better

@mathforge It'll rile pedants, but I'd be happy to call it 'a genus'.
As in, "let's draw a genus here, and a genus over there"

@KangarooPhysics @AllanMcRobie And...?

@icecolbeveridge @k_houston_math BIG fan of this

OK, I've had some good suggestions. Let's pick one.
This is:

Don't you just hate it when you have a piece left over at the end?
somethingorotherwhatever.com/jiggraph/

The Eyes have it!
This shape is an Eye of Torus.

@jasonemiller That's interesting, thanks!

@eduardojdiniz Yes, I can see that!

@DavidKButlerUoA What's yours? Mine was ODEs

"1 garlic clove, halved"

Whoah, slow down there, cowboy!

@zithral @DavidKButlerUoA I think the numbering normally goes in the order the matches happen, so \1 is the first group matched, \2 is the second, and so on

@zithral @DavidKButlerUoA so if the input is "hello hell" and the regex is "(he)(l+)o \1\2", then \1 matches the other instance of "he" and \2 matches the other instance of "ll"

@DavidKButlerUoA @zithral I have seen that somewhere, but can't think where!
When/if you come back to this, one thing that helped me learn was looking at railroad diagrams, showing the paths a regular expression can take. debuggex.com seems to produce a nice display

Over the weekend I revamped my personal homepage.
I've tried to collect all the online things I've made - that's over 160 things!
Please have a look: somethingorotherwhatever.com

I love this short exact banana split sequence on @Jaredongaro's staff page!
profiles.uonbi.ac.ke/ongaro

@JanvierUK they might have run out again. Took me ages to get any in 2020

Why is it that I can trim a video in basically no time on my phone, but trimming a video on my desktop requires either spending 10 minutes re-rendering, or can only trim on keyframes?
I'm on linux, and I've tried kdenlive and avidemux. Is there a tool I'm missing?

Feels like something ffmpeg should be able to do

@henryseg Yeah, I did think about that, but I'm surprised desktop GPUs aren't even quicker

Since John found this, it reminds me of a question about it: following the rules of this game, is it true that any division of the square into rectangles can be draggy-boxed back to the whole square? twitter.com/mathhombre/sta…

@Skippa23 I just loaded it on my phone and realised that I never added support for touch screens! So if you're on a phone too, that'll be why

@Skippa23 now fixed!

and now I've played the game again, I have an answer to my question. I won't put it here, in case anyone else wants to think about it

@htfb literally just adding in touch screen support now. Try reloading, and tell me if it's any better?

you: python lists are zero-indexed

me:

@NclNumbas Well, big shot, if seq[0] gets the first item in the list, why doesn't seq[-0] get the last item?

@NclNumbas having a totally normal one

@pwr2dppl it's a song by Des'ree

@htfb yeah, it needs a bigger margin of error for touches.

That wikipedia page doesn't give an explicit answer either way, does it?
I have a v simple example in mind

@htfb yep

@htfb next question: given an initial division which can be reduced to the whole square, is it possible to merge rectangles so that you get stuck?
Again, I have a simple example in mind

@TimHarford I think you have to declare your colour model before that question can be answered. You could justify saying the average would be white, or grey, or even black, depending on how you combine colours

@Vittori61412811 @glitch shouldn't be! Did something look wrong?

@NewcastleUniUCU what about the other three fights? Is next week just about pensions?

@NewcastleUniUCU lovely, thanks

Heed the Scrambled Egg of Safety! twitter.com/john_overholt/…

bold of the internal conference organisers to send out an email today asking for confirmation of something by the 18th, when all the days in between are strike days

@josstified I've got 'esoteric' and 'erotic' the wrong way round more times than I enjoy

Now 211 things, after I added more git repos to do with my work, and some of my favourite bits of writing

@pwr2dppl This feels like another instance of "America: we're a classless society (because the working class aren't people)"

@dandersod That is beautiful!

"If mathematical constants are so great, how come there's no mathematical constants II?"

cambridge.org/gb/academic/su…

Does anyone know a good quote about 'stamp-collecting' in mathematics - the idea of churning out examples or theorems for completeness, rather than seeing some greater structure?

ah, I might have been thinking of this, usually attributed to Ernest Rutherford: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/08/sta…

@benorlin Ouija boards around Hanover start spelling out M O N A D S

@evelynjlamb @mathzorro @pwr2dppl I don't know how you have the patience for it! I'm 38 guesses in and I've decided I don't know any more words

@pwr2dppl @evelynjlamb @mathzorro I found my self guessing 'cry, weep, crying, tears' and felt it was time to stop

@evelynjlamb @pwr2dppl @mathzorro I would totally just press the "I give up" button

@NewcastleUniUCU hang on, I think I know this one: if you increase the race pay gap while stood on an escalator, it cancels out

@karenshancock thanks for telling me. It looks like I didn't fix a version of a library, and the latest version broke something.
It's working again now

@JimPropp I have a suspicion that
x^2+y^2+2xy+(1)(1)
would also work

@ZenoRogue @JimPropp indeed

@jjaron we all had runny noses for a couple of days after storm arwen up here. I think it whips up dust

@ZenoRogue @JimPropp to be clear: my suspicion is that they're looking for the substring ")(" as a proxy for "this expression is a product"
You'd be surprised how many e-assessment systems fall back on string-matching tricks

it's amazing how easy it is to set up a server with websockets on @glitch. Saved me a lot of time fiddling with my own server!

Anyway, I invented a word game in school and I spent last week making a nice online version of it, at nulac.glitch.me

Does anyone fancy a game?

@glitch whoever I'm playing against: I'm sorry

WHAT twitter.com/mikebray303/st…

@glitch they pulled it back! Maybe I should have disputed "YORKSHIRETERRIER"

@IRainsby what about recycling?

@Raspberry_Pi time to resurrect checkmyworking.com/misc/clever-ha…

@icecolbeveridge @glitch weird! I hadn't tested on Chrome, but I have just now and it looks alright, except for the colours. I'm having lunch now, so will look later. Can you look at the developer console?

Back at work for a couple of days in the middle of #UCUStrike. I've been feeling guilty about not being more vocal, because I can't picket for long.
136 unread emails. At least it seems I've gummed up the gears of academia a little bit.

Of course, many of those unread emails are from people who decided to undermine the strike by continuing to work.

somehow back on my animations nonsense again, prompted by some puzzles posted by @blatherwick_sam
As a screensaver: rectangle-pals.glitch.me

@stecks @blatherwick_sam oh yikes, me too!

@stecks @blatherwick_sam yeah, and I meant to add in some weighting to it so the expected number of rectangles is finite

@blatherwick_sam @DavidKButlerUoA No, it wouldn't! I was hoping someone would notice that

"Subtract a from b" = "b - a"

"Divide a by b" = "a ÷ b"

Is there a phrase equivalent to "b ÷ a" where a occurs before b?

@Cshearer41 I've never understood what that means! Thanks!

@mathsjem so "divide three into six" gives 2?

I've never understood "divide into" so avoid it. Is "divide six into threes" a thing, and does it give 2?

@jedediyah is there a way of saying that as a statement, instead of a question?

POV: you're cooking a Sunday roast and your shoulder decides not to be in its socket any more.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

@jjsanderson It didn't really go all the way out, I just needed to push it against something for a bit until it felt firmer

@blatherwick_sam I'm wary of being all y'a qu'a fau qu'on, but can't you just say "symmetry" and twiddle your mustaches?

@DavidKButlerUoA @blatherwick_sam A really useful French phrase for the kind of person who always say "you just have to..."
Because it's slang there are a million ways of spelling it.
fr.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yakafokon

@DavidKButlerUoA @blatherwick_sam Nope!

@DavidKButlerUoA @blatherwick_sam I didn't expect you to know it, and I hoped you'd ask. It's really useful!
An English equivalent would be something like a 'yahaveta' or 'yasimply'

@Andrew_Taylor Back of the class, Taylor

Is this the worst integer sequence? oeis.org/A133376

New π maths just dropped, @standupmaths twitter.com/mathGMb/status…

A backwards bourbon! (a bournob?)

Is there an old wife around who can tell me what this augurs?

Not sure how to feel about the fact that the rate at which I make things, as measured by my homepage, has been pretty much constant since 2011

@stecks That wasn't an 'if and only if', so there's still a chance you're happy

@zithral I think 125 = 5³ is the smallest integer with an abbreviation:
Smallest such integer must have at least 3 digits. Abbreviations must have at least 2 digits. All products and squares of two digits < 100. All higher powers of 2,3,4 are > 125

@zithral Is this question related to Kolmogorov complexity?

@htfb @zithral This has rung a faint bell about how you can make everything from a single 4, with repeated factorials, roots, and rounding

Suppose you have all the numbers, but the only thing you know how to do with them is

m(x, y, z) = min(x+y, x+z, y+z)

Given any x and y, can you produce x+y using only m?

#IHaveAnAnswer

(no, infinity is not a number you can put into m)

@langtoneagle Yes, you can name any constant

@langtoneagle Maybe the most straightforward way of stating that constraint is: you have to commit to which other numbers you're going to use before I give you x and y

@yet_so_far After how many steps?

@mscroggs Nice! And what if you can only check for equality with x or y? Or can't check for equality at all?

@yet_so_far In order to know when to stop, you have to know how to compare two numbers. If you can't do that, is it still possible?

@yet_so_far @virtualcourtney I deliberately left it vague! I like how there are different answers for different sets of numbers

I have half a joke in my head, but I can't remember the rest of it.
It's something like: <famous mathematician X> said they could tell me all the digits of pi. It went:
3 <wait a second>, 1 <wait 2 seconds>, 4 <wait 4 seconds>, ...

Does that ring any bells with anyone?

@logopetria Yes! That's it!

@icecolbeveridge oh yes, I think I've heard that one too.
But $1 after 1 day, another dollar two days later, then three days later, ... would avoid paying impossibly small amounts

@robinhouston @logopetria aha, that's precisely what I was thinking of. Thanks!

@PyViv C'est pareil ici, sauf Encanto au lieu de Peppa Pig. Hier c'était la fille, aujourd'hui c'est la bébé aussi.

@ftp_alun @robinhouston @logopetria I think the point that finitists make is that there's a difference between "can" and "will"

@robinhouston @vigornian why 'arkan'?

@robinhouston @vigornian google only turns up a Serbian war criminal, so I wouldn't be too happy glibly using that

@JanvierUK That's almost as cringe as the priapic ones the tories came up with for each other

Just got Doctored again, in the programme of an internal conference. Added to the file for my PhD-by-reputation submission.

@DavidKButlerUoA You've certainly spent longer thinking about it than I did! Thanks for having a go.
I hope you have less tough days ahead of you

@zithral or, you could repeatedly pick from a range that might contain non-abbreviable numbers, until you get one that is abbreviable

@DavidKButlerUoA You're not going to like it! I'm pretty sure you need some way of comparing numbers or testing for equality.
The answer I had starts with m(x, y, 0) and either give you min(x, y) or x+y. So if you can test for equality you can pick one of m(x, y, x), m(x, y, y) or m(x, y, 0)

@DavidKButlerUoA Sorry!

> list.osrt()
TypeError: osrt is not a function

it feels morally right that every anagram of 'sort' should be valid

@yet_so_far Thanks to the gender calendar gap, women's years only have 330 days

@GreyAlien Was that only 2004? I remember it well!

@DavidKButlerUoA It must be terrifying writing out equations for students when you're their maths lecturer

Saw a student type `sqrt^3(x)` for the cube root of x.
I don't think there's a world in which that's OK, but I can see where they came from. Fascinating!

@apgox indeed. I'd be surprised if this student knew TeX, and the TeX command is pretty hard to justify as well!

@ZenoRogue @apgox Aha! Thanks

@d_yellowlees you could interpret point 1 as "get their attention at all costs", which I think is wrong. And "they" are not homogeneous - I'm happy with some people in attendance not paying attention to my talk

Not even 6am and both children have had double breakfast. It's going to be a long day!

Day 4 of today: were watching Bavarian bierhall music on YouTube

@jjsanderson Afternoon

@DanielColquitt I hope the next tweet in this thread has you troubleshooting the problem from a safe distance down the street

This makes me wonder: I've seen a list showing that printer ink is the most expensive thing per unit volume, so what's the most expensive thing per unit time?
My first guess is going to space twitter.com/alisonkiddle/s…

@icecolbeveridge I think to avoid "any number divided by a small number is a huge number", I'd prefer to limit the scope to things that are normally charged per unit of time

@icecolbeveridge but if we're going with "dropping an iPad", I raise you "shooting a cruise missile"

The eldest has opened a pretend café in the bath (lovely)
You have to order online (🙄)
Some things are out of stock (she's been listening, then)
Now I'm stuck in a circular conversation about undelivered soup with the AI chatbot (!)

Before I lose a day wrangling with LaTeX: does anyone have an example of putting 2×3 cards on a single side of A4?
Maybe Beamer could do this without much effort? Each card will just have a line of text on it, and nothing else.

@BlindMath I'll have a look, thanks!

@BlindMath I want to lay out some cards to print and then cut out

@pkrautz it is not. That's a good idea, thanks! I thought of SVG first, but laying out text in SVG is a knacker

Maths, and the world mathematical year 2000 posters, are for ever.

@apgox thanks!

I'm in my office for only the second time since lockdown, and this is still in my wall.
Hopefully we can run it again this year!

This poster is now older than almost all of our undergrads

@honeypisquared @EllieRobinsonGB I don't know why but I suddenly feel like singing la marseillaise

@mscroggs I've got something going in HTML, thanks

@hnodrog If you mean things measured in units of (volume × time), maybe "keeping a litre of air in orbit"?

@hnodrog Or something to do with whatever fusion reactors do with their insides

@hnodrog Oh no, those are both (volume ÷ time)

@Kit_Yates_Maths They should call the news the derivatives - it only reports on changes

@maddiemoate PL-P has recently discovered "Do You Know?" She keeps asking how things are made, and then asking to see if Maddie can tell us. She's drawn this picture of you and asked me to send it to you

Food critics: "What if I could be hungry... as a job??"

Happy π day!
I've finally made myself a compose-key shortcut for π so I can type it easily.

I added this line to the bottom of my ~/.XCompose file:

<Multi_key> <p> <i> : "π"

(how to turn on the compose key on Ubuntu: help.ubuntu.com/community/Comp…)

Conjecture: each day in March is special, in a different way of writing dates.

MAR10: Mario day
12/3: Counting day??
3/14: π day

Oh! I had wondered about all the <dead_greek> entries in .XCompose.
It turns out I can map a key to produce <dead_greek>, and type any Greek letter easily.

I mapped the "menu" key next to my right Ctrl:

xmodmap -e 'keycode 135 = dead_greek'

Then <dead_greek> <p> gets π

@lunasorcery brings a new meaning to "wet-look trousers"

update: I have just accidentally typed Τ, which is not the letter T. It's capital tau. Which is visually indistinguishable from latin T

I'm in @standupmaths's π day video as part of the team failing to reproduce local hero William Shanks's by-hand approximation of π: youtube.com/watch?v=dtiLxL…

@two_star interesting! Can I see your .XCompose?

@k_houston_math @standupmaths I mean, it took Shanks his entire life, so...

@two_star Ahh, I see what you mean now

Here are some sequences of numbers that I have generated. Can you spot a link between them?

1,2,3,5,8,13
1,2,5,12,29,70
1,2,21,212,2141,21622

oh, #IHaveAnAnswer

@robinhouston exactly!

@standupmaths and following that Herculean effort, I spent some #UCUStrike days implementing the streaming digits algorithm I talk about in that video, in my calculator.
It turns out it's called constructive real arithmetic, and your android calculator already does it: twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

@NewcastleUniUCU The university, in its majestic equality, can pile an unsustainable workload on any employee regardless of his/her/their pronouns

@miclugo *waves from 55°N*

Wordle and p-adic norms. Two great tastes that taste weird together? twitter.com/PyViv/status/1…

This is valid R, assigning the value 3 to both a and b:

a <- 3 -> b

This is not valid R:
5 -> a <- 1

It gives:
Error in (a <- 5) <- 1 : could not find function "<-<-"

What is R doing here?

What's the maximum number of devices continually streaming shows off Netflix so that it's possible no show will be streamed more than once in a 24 hour period?

@algebrandis tell me more

@icecolbeveridge @standupmaths How would the binomial expansion go? Is that reciprocal easy?

@icecolbeveridge @standupmaths So it's reduced to finding powers of 2 and 11 and multiplying those. Well, 1/239 recurs after 7 digits (thanks reciprocals-list.glitch.me), so I don't think the binomial method will ever be quicker than long division

@LongFormMath You've inspired me to make a thing that actually does this: A Tale of log(2) Cities
a-tale-of-log-2-cities.glitch.me

Found this photo I took in 2017. I like it!

I miss the days when getting up at 5am was a rarity

Bravo to the people who put kids' videos on YouTube named with nonsense string of letters, so they come up when your baby gets hold of the Google search bar.

I've made a new game: Prime Run.
From a randomly-chosen starting number, can you get to the target by repeatedly adding or subtracting prime factors of your number?

isthisprime.com/game2/

"Why is this O(N⁴) algorithm taking so long?!" - me, apparently with cheese for brains

Happy Sunday to this absolute bargain

The plot thickens: doing the O(N³) algorithm N times is drastically quicker.

I've just realised I still consider the way my left elbow moves as 'unusual', after it changed when I was like 12 twitter.com/OdyO11/status/…

@jjsanderson nope! I think my first go was just more terrible than I expected

@jjsanderson happy birthday! May there be fewer plagues in the next 50 years

@LONMathsJam If it was down before, it's back now

@pwr2dppl And also how can you understand the words 'empire' and 'royal family' and not see how the two are linked?

@LONMathsJam downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mathsjam.com says it's up, and I can load it

@LONMathsJam maybe a DNS problem? It's @standupmaths's server, so I can't do anything

@wtgowers I really appreciate the uncomplicated notation you use, like writing (0,0) for the origin instead of vector 0, which it felt like you were initially going to go for.
Is that a conscious decision to make it easier to follow along, or is it for your benefit too, or just a habit?

@Lourdes4eva @BenFordhamLive @stoker_aj @ScottMorrisonMP That's not me. Please delete this tweet

Welp, I've finally got covid.

@JanvierUK yeah, at least I can be more sure that I hadn't had it before now. I was starting to wonder if I'd just not noticed it!
Are you starting to feel better?

I've just realised it's two years to the day since the first UK lockdown was announced

@GreyAlien yeah, I think my last day in the office was a week or so before the announcement. I suppose I should be pleased I've avoided it this long, but it shouldn't have been inevitable that I'd get it!

@GreyAlien almost definitely my daughter's nursery.

@JanvierUK my chest doesn't feel great, but nothing too bad so far. Mild cold symptoms - bit of a runny nose and a headache, gunky ears

@pippinsboss Commiserations! Best of luck to you

@samholloway I feel blessed by association

This feels unfair

Colourblind robots!
I move to make a barcode scanner the mascot of @colourblindorg twitter.com/LordWoolamaloo…

Unprovoked violence from this survey, putting me in the same age bracket as 49-year-olds

@algebrandis @HaydeeLindo Yes! This is my fave too

@algebrandis @HaydeeLindo In my head it's the "now you'll never forget what a commutator is" problem

@honeypisquared I have a sense of déjà-vu, but: "simplify"

5 days in, and today's LFT is arguably more positive than the first

I'm as big a fan of 0-indexing as you'll find, but I was amazed to see that the guidance counts the day of your first positive as day 0.
Why, in the biggest public health campaign for decades, would you make an unconventional choice which leads to errors in the wrong direction?!

2022, and the university's sickness absence "form" is still an Excel worksheet

@pippinsboss that wily virus!

@jjsanderson I doubt that!

@jamesgrime goodness me, that's reasonably priced!

Day 8, and still positive LFT. The girl and the wife are over it, but the baby and I are apparently on team Covid4Eva

@sara_marine @ncl_LTDS Gyros: Greek
Beef: British
Chicken: Crispy

Noodles of nowhere!

@sara_marine @ncl_LTDS I'm not saying decolonise Street Kitchen, but I am strongly implying it

I don't welcome my life insurance provider sending me an email titled "Let's talk about the cost of living".

Day 10: finally negative!!!

@Tegglington Crikey, what an achievement!

@ionicasmeets

Putting together a conference timetable. I really wish I was familiar with an automatic constraint solver

What's 30% off £7?

How did you work it out?

I noticed a thing about it that is quite pleasing.

@MouldS and then subtract the £2.10 from £7?

just noticed it might look like I wanted 30% _of_ £7.

I want to reduce a price of £7 by 30%

@samholloway @MouldS do you think you spotted the thing I did? Was it worth spotting?

@icecolbeveridge @samholloway @MouldS That's what I spotted! Nothing world shaking, but it's always a nice day to see a square number in the wild

@AlirezaSoroudi I had 26 talks of varying lengths to fit into a timetable with 10 sessions. Each talk could only take place at certain times, and I wanted to put pre-recorded talks together in the same session.
I did it by hand, in the end

@TobyBailey Yes, it is! Do as much as possible in integers then shift down.
I was translating the source code of the android calculator app recently, and that's how it does it!

@joshlaison This reads like the most complicated answer yet, but each step is a justifiable shortcut. Amazing!

Since there seems to be another wave of people looking for ways to quit twitter, I'll mention that @ColinTheMathmo and I run a mastodon instance for mathematicians at mathstodon.xyz
It has LaTeX math rendering!

@LongFormMath nice!
Needs more wobbly text, though, like somethingorotherwhatever.com/sum-of-3-palin…

Is there a word for when there's a word for something?

@MattPDickinson does that describe a situation where there's a word for the situation?

@DavidKButlerUoA I think the same is true of percentages

@cs_kaplan @JimPropp @G4GCelebration I'm not taking part physically or virtually, but I know @ColinTheMathmo is helping to facilitate mingling on Gather

That's it! I'm on holiday until the 19th! Whoop!

"Dear Father Christmas, I'd like a baby who wakes up at 04:00 with a full menu of unsatisfiable needs and a penchant for violence"

- apparently me, 2 years ago

@DrCaroSummers The one where they bring you a new course every three minutes

@DrEugeniaCheng I've thought for a long time that hotel booking sites should report the distance to the nearest power outlet from the head of the bed, factoring in any furniture that a charging cable would have to go round

What I'd really like in @geogebra is the ability to pick any length or area and give its value, or pick a point and give its coordinates, then the coordinate system is transformed to suit.

I thought I was listening to A Podcast of Unnecessary Detail, but I just heard @MouldS say "I won't go into the details".
I've been sold a bill of goods!

Factorise 17496.
I'd expect it to come up more often than it does

@miclugo I think that is exactly the right reaction

I'm not saying anything as sappy as "I've found my perfect love match", but we'll both add an extra egg to the pan in order to restore parity to the egg box

James gets it twitter.com/jtombs/status/…

@jtombs I think I remember @howie_hua or @JimPropp tweeting about this in the past. We should form a club

@howie_hua @jtombs @JimPropp yes!

Thinking about the Lousy Labelling puzzle that @DavidKButlerUoA tweeted about. It can't be a coincidence that there are 6 permutations of three boxes, and this table has 6 entries

Can it? Maybe it is!
Anyway, this puzzle also reminds me that derangements - permutations where nothing stays still - are hard to count

Today's driving game: spot a two-lane palindrome.
For example, I just saw a 17 reg in the inside lane and a 71 in the outside.
(to be clear, I'm not driving)

@elliewix Me making syntactical shortcuts for common patterns: Yes! YES!!!

Me trying to use the syntactical shortcuts together: Well, this sucks

Great title, and a game involving derangements!
The paper is on the arXiv at arxiv.org/abs/2006.04805 twitter.com/Plektix/status…

A sequence that is inexplicably not in the OEIS yet:

1,
0,1,1,
2,
0,2,1,
1,1,1,
0,1,2,
3,
…

Can you guess what it is?

@algebrandis @pwr2dppl Those damned Romans

@LaurenceSatow Not the next line I was expecting! Can you explain yours?

@LaurenceSatow Yes!

Go Jetters: "Africa is the second-biggest continent"
On screen: a Mercator+ projection, showing Africa as roughly the size of Greenland

Today, while recovering from my holiday, I'm catching up on the @MathsObjects podcast. It's a good podcast! Who knew?

@honeypisquared a) Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

@peterrowlett Not pictured: the tile picturing all sets not pictured on any tile

@peterrowlett Uh oh. I verbed 'picture' too much and now I don't know what I can verb any more

@henryseg @MathMechs @willsegerman That is really cool!

@peterrowlett Well obviously the episode I was on was no good, so I'm gratified to hear that other guests did a better job

@pwr2dppl My child regularly says things that are obviously false when trying to work out what she wants and it's really annoying and I have no advice

@Clare_L_Wallace There's a maths trail?! We were just in Derbyshire last week and decided against Crich because it just looked like a smaller Beamish

I use an OTP app for two-factor authentication for all sorts of things.
It comes up with a new 6-digit code every few seconds.
This question occurred to me: is it possible for it to come up with the same code twice in a row?

@mountain_ghosts 6 digits is only a million possibilities, so in absolute terms it must be quite common, even if I personally am unlikely to see it, right?

@mountain_ghosts what do I look like, some kind of curious person with both the means and know-how to investigate this? I'll stick to idle speculation on twitter.com thank you

I found an OTP library to test this, and you do indeed get repeats! You'd expect to repeat the last code once in a million times. Codes normally last 30 seconds, so expect 1 repeat per ~348 days, so just about once a year.
I'm now convinced that someone will see this happen.

@icecolbeveridge I've got about a dozen services in my OTP app, so it actually works!

@schrisomalis I'd always thought it was a regional thing from some region I'm not familiar with. I hadn't considered that it might just be a global change!

@peterrowlett Oh, good point - two accounts making the same code at the same time would be easier to notice

My copy of @benorlin's "Math Games with Bad Drawings" has arrived. The hype is true: it is indeed extremely large.
Toddler who is tall for his age for scale.

Too big for my bookcase

@elinoroberts @benorlin they're fab, aren't they? He has so many hand-me-downs from big boy rellies, we decided to get him one nice outfit of his own

@peterrowlett @benorlin Oh, no! Haven't looked in it yet - awaiting the correct lifting gear

@DataRevelations @benorlin

Now I've had a quick leaf through it: Ben is bad at drawing and very good at writing

@jjaron Northerners complaining about public transport is tiresome, I know, but: what I'd give for just 10 minutes between trains!

@jjaron sounds like you have plenty of good transport options?

Really frustrating time trying to help a blind colleague access @gather_town, over the phone. He got into the space, but couldn't work out how to grant the site access to his mic.
We'll have to come up with some convoluted pass-through to a normal phone call, I think

@gather_town I think he was using the non-Blink version of Edge. Does anyone know how to enable mic access for a page with keyboard only? We got stuck in the site permissions tab, but couldn't find a drop-down to change from "ask" to "allow"

@emilyriehl and in French too - you're talking about this, right? people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/zagier/files/e…

@MotivicKyle I guess that you already know all the _really_ cool math facts I know. Here's a somewhat-cool one:

If you take a planar graph and put all its vertices on the spine of a book, you will need at most four pages to draw all the edges without intersections: read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/FourPage…

@MotivicKyle Yeah, that's great. I've been meaning to suggest to @MathsGear that they should put it on a t-shirt

@ergodictom @MotivicKyle Which paper?

Someone tweets about a field of maths I understand: hah that's so cool you can have a like and a RT

Someone tweets about a field of maths I don't understand: How could anyone find that interesting? Glad I'm not that much of a nerd

@kyledevans I don't know how it's written, but it's pronounced the same as gif

@peterrowlett @divbyzero @benorlin I've heard you have to buy an extra seat for it

@Smylers2 That's a tricksy junction! Hope you enjoyed the rest of Northumberland. Did you spend long in Warkworth?

@ukor looks good on firefox on ubuntu

@ukor and firefox on android too

@peterrowlett my strategy of listening to episodes six months to a year after release is paying off

I'd never thought about this, but of course: underneath the massive stone monument must be something to keep it there! twitter.com/CherryBaz/stat…

If I've achieved nothing else in my life, you can't say I didn't occasionally blog about maths.

Can't believe it's been 10 years. Feels like both forever and no time at all. twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

My favourite bits on The Aperiodical that I was responsible for:

1) It all started with a column on @Samuel_Hansen's blog, The Internet Maths Aperiodical - a collection of random maths stuff I'd seen. I moved those over to aperiodical.com: aperiodical.com/category/colum…

2) The integer sequence reviews I did with @TweetsofCushing: aperiodical.com/category/colum…. Pure delight! Completely self-indulgent, although it led to..

.. a @numberphile video!
youtube.com/watch?v=VDD6FD…
We weren't prepared for how seriously people took the competition, and I think fiddling the winner so it'd fit on a trophy might have been the wrong thing to do

3) The #BigMathOff: aperiodical.com/category/the-b…
Plan: get people to tell me fun maths facts.
Result: I can call @ch_nira The World's Most Interesting Mathematician and everyone else goes along with it?

4) This gif, on the "Riemann hypothesis not proved" post, which continued to get a steady stream of attention for several years.
aperiodical.com/2015/11/rieman…

5) The Nonsense Formula Disapprove-o-Matic 3000, which would be wheeled into action whenever the words "formula for the perfect ..." appeared in a newspaper.
It hasn't disapproved of anything in a while, but it is ready and waiting aperiodical.com/?s=disapprove-…

6) My post on the lullaby sequence. @aap03102 said "The way Christian tells this is completely charming". I don't think I'll do any better than that.

aperiodical.com/2021/07/a-lull…

I don't have much time to write my own stuff these days, but I hope the site keeps going as a place for keen maths fans to put stuff and have a load of other maths fans see it.

But those are just the things I did. The thing I'm most proud of is the huge gang of other people who have used the site to share their own fun maths over the years, and the connections it's helped to make.

@mathhombre @samjshah aww, thanks!

@MickyRich1982 @TWhitleyBay1 My 4-year-old will be overjoyed. She always used to shout "THE CLOCK!!" when we passed it

Start at 0, and count up in 1s until you get to a multiple of 2.
Then count up in 2s until you get to a multiple of 3.
And so on and so on...

Can you spot a pattern?
Can you explain the pattern?

Can you spot another pattern, and can you explain that too?

@yet_so_far "I didn't think the rules would apply to me!" wails supporter of the Rules For Everyone Else Party

@henryseg @soupie66 Yep. When we had unrestricted registration there were thousands of spammers

@soupie66 @ColinTheMathmo @henryseg Can you try again? I've updated the server to the latest version of mastodon, and it shouldn't ask you for a code any more.

@sibumaiti yep, that's the first one I thought of. Can you spot any patterns in the numbers that appear?

@NickJTaylor @aperiodical Most surprising equation in mathematics:

2 + 4 = 3!

@sibumaiti Very nice!

@HypercubicPeg @johncarlosbaez

@WBayLabour _two_ bookshops on Park View? Be still my beating heart!

@mscroggs Noooooooooooo

@gregeganSF Have you seen this? arxiv.org/abs/2203.13870…

@lunasorcery until you said it, I hadn't realised I missed this!

"I wish I could compile LaTeX in my browser"

*monkey's paw curls a finger*

somethingorotherwhatever.com/pyodide-plaste…

@honeypisquared I've had to say no to an in-person event in London today, so I'm in the same mood as you. I'm all three of disabled, with childcare responsibilities, and don't want to catch or spread covid, so it was a definite no.
Just do stuff online!

@mathforge I think mathjax is lenient

Whattt!!! twitter.com/TyneSnapper/st…

@SparksMaths @TedG @ProfKinyon @MathsTechnology Yes, that's what I use

@cox_tom it looks like the photos are from a documentary: eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/tony-an…
I found that by putting the last image in google image search

@edsouthall *taps make-it-rain-bloomberg.glitch.me *

@peterrowlett My one this morning: "numbers are important, aren't they?"

My shoulders have been clicking loads lately, and my left shoulder constantly feels like I'm having to expend effort to keep it in place.
Do any other #EhlersDanlos #EDS people do anything to keep your joints together? My wife keeps talking about 'taping it up' - is that a thing?

@jtombs thanks. A quick google didn't fill me with confidence

@jtombs although the problem is that I'm hypermobile, and find it really hard to tone muscles, so I'm not sure training will do much

@aperfect My commiserations at this difficult time.

JS build tools: not even once

@jjaron I've just this minute set up a poll with framadate, and it was completely straightforward: framadate.org/abc/

@d_yellowlees You gave me feedback about how I stand once, but when I explained my disability you retracted it, so 👍 to you

@NTyneLivingSt Ah, I wondered if we were right at the back, and it looks like we were!

@NTyneLivingSt Massive thanks to everyone who organised it, and for being so patient with us. Little L-P loved it!

New meme format
somethingorotherwhatever.com/didnt-graduate…

@samholloway yeah, it should load a webfont, not going to investigate why it doesn't!

@ashcroftethics @lastpositivist I'll take it!

@PandaAured Yep

@yet_so_far real truth

@d_yellowlees The teeny tiny rijksmuseum outpost is worth wandering past

@LongFormMath yeeeeikes

@LongFormMath by the way, is it still not doing the right font for you? I thought I'd fixed that

@qhuytran Ooh good point, I didn't think of that

@elinoroberts You definitely did!

@DavidKButlerUoA I think this attitude is quite common among engineers. I've heard it a few times

@stephanneuhaus1 Interdisciplinary!

@JonathanHoefler I'd love to know what caused that! I guess the r and y are a fallback font, so: why would a font have superscript p,a,o,d, but not r or y?

@JonathanHoefler ahh, because r and y are in "spacing modifier letters", but p, a o, d are in "phonetic extensions"!

I've done some thinking about how you type mathematical notation on a mobile device, where you basically only have the alphabet and a couple of punctuation characters available on the keyboard.

Your thoughts, please!

checkmyworking.com/posts/2022/05/…

@NoeAubinCadot I use unicodeit a lot, and I've contributed to the source code!

@peterrowlett Yeah, I had a go

@peterrowlett Sorry, I should respond more thoughtfully, but most of my attention at the moment is directed on holding my knee and shoulder joints in

Does anyone have any idea what this character is for: ⋳
"element of with vertical bar at end of horizontal stroke (U+22F3)"

@jimbo_cramer fao @anildash

The girl: "why does my friend talk about numbers so much?"
"Because that's one of the things they like. What do you like?"
(without skipping a beat)
"Unicorns and picking my nose"

Credit to her for honesty, I suppose

@GreyAlien that farm house is also incongruously modern!

I solved #OEISle 1 in 5!
✓✓✓✓✗
✓✓✓✓✗
✓✓✓✓✗
✓✓✓✓↔
✓✓✓✓✓
somethingorotherwhatever.com/oeisle

I solved #OEISle 2 in 2!
✗↔↔↔↔
✓✓✓✓✓
somethingorotherwhatever.com/oeisle

@BernhardWerner Heh! In testing it, I found that _lots_ of sequences start with really boring boring strings like 0,0,0,0,0 or 0,1,2,3,4, but every now and then you get one that's basically unguessable

@jjaron how does the weight matter?

@jjaron but if it's a really expensive small part, then changes in its price will noticeably affect the price of the product

@BernhardWerner congratulations! Look forward to the days when the feelings of tiredness overtake the feelings of incompetence

@yet_so_far The standalone app is awful. Just loading it in your normal browser is marginally better

@evelynjlamb It took me two days in Wyoming to believe that the "system" for crossing the road was, in addition to buttons like this, to pick up and wave a going-into-battle-sized red flag.
Somehow when I crossed without a flag it was my fault for getting in the way???

On my blog: Overthinking conference admin
checkmyworking.com/posts/2022/05/…
Some information about how I've automated some of the process of managing a fully-online academic conference.

I solved #OEISle 4 in 5!
✗↔↔✗↔
✓✓✓✗↔
✓✓✓✓✗
✓✓✓✓✗
✓✓✓✓✓
somethingorotherwhatever.com/oeisle

@Boud241 @Pier4r

@robeastaway If this amused you, there's a very similar puzzle called Dominosa in Simon Tatham's puzzle collection
chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzz…

Ooof. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's very hard.

I solved #OEISle 9 in 8!
somethingorotherwhatever.com/oeisle

@sibumaiti Incredible!

@monsoon0 Fantastic bird, fantastic word

@setalyas @aperiodical Not sure it'll help much: even just for numbers up to 1000, that's a million possible games.
And I'd have to track results, which I don't currently do

@chris_fairless That's vacuously correct?

A while ago over on Mastodon @davidphys1@mathstodon.xyz asked why nobody had made animations of the shunting yard algorithm with cutesy trains.
There is no surer way to summon me!
I've spent some of my spare time over the bank holidays making exactly that: somethingorotherwhatever.com/shunting-yard-…

The core problem is that you need to work out what just what an operator applies to: with the order of operations, it might be just one number, or it might a large sub-expression.

The algorithm solves this by holding operators on a separate stack until they're needed.

The shunting yard algorithm neatly solves the problem of translating a mathematical expression written in infix notation (operators go between the numbers/letters) to postfix notation (operators go after the things they act on).
youtube.com/watch?v=gHniHE…

Here are some animations to illustrate.

In the first, operations happen left-to-right, so they appear in the same order in the output as in the input.

In the second, the addition must happen after the multiplication, so it's held back.

In the third, brackets ensure that the addition happens first.

The last wrinkle for standard arithmetic is that exponentiation is right-associative: while for the other operations you work left-to-right:
1 − 2 − 3 = (1 − 2) − 3,

the order goes the other way for exponentiation:
1 ^ 2 ^ 3 = 1 ^ (2 ^ 3)

@MrDee_Maths @Wyatt915 @TahaRhhh @FlammableMaths @howie_hua I've got the stars for that: as well as 51 and 57, 39 is an underappreciated prim-poster.
aperiodical.com/2016/05/are-yo…

@kyledevans Iraq war protest songs?

@matemdiscreta insider trading I can overlook, but plagiarism is unforgivable! press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…

@matemdiscreta no no no, your picture was good!

Sad work news: @Tegglington is leaving us (boo!)

Good news: you could have his old job (hooray!)

We're recruiting a Teaching and Research Technical Officer. Responsibilities include working with me on @NclNumbas.

jobs.ncl.ac.uk/job/Newcastle-…

@peterrowlett @Tegglington @NclNumbas @gwstagg I and George's replacement will take over Chirun development

This looks like fun! twitter.com/SLSingh/status…

Is it clear that people younger than 18 when this is introduced would never be able to smoke?
"Add a year every year" feels different to "Nobody born after this date may ever smoke", but isn't.
Is it? twitter.com/politic_animal…

@johnharvey_math Ohh, good point!

@gregeganSF I remember being sat up in the gods and catching dairy milk at a panto when I was little, but I can't work out how that was possible. Were ushers throwing chocolate in from the sides? Many questions

@samholloway Commiserations! You've done well to avoid it this long

@soupie66 @mathemensch @Thalesdisciple @TeXgallery @mscroggs I don't know of a package, but there are plenty of cat emoji that you could use. Here's an example: overleaf.com/read/stgkmybfq…
Use something like graphemica.com/search?q=+cat to find the codes for different emoji

Someone at Edexcel is looking at this, and the masses of people that go on twitter immediately after an exam to complain about unfair questions, and an idea is forming in their head. twitter.com/Cloudflare/sta…

@JanvierUK *waves magic wand*

You may now call yourself disabled

@JanvierUK Everyone does

¡doʇS twitter.com/ShowMeASignBry…

@TobyBailey @peterrowlett Child about 10, parent 0

@chalkdustmag @peterrowlett @clopenmic @24hmaths What's the opposite of the heckle "amateurs"?

@growlaughlearn @TWhitleyBay1 I've always tied my bike to the railings. It could really do with some proper bike stands!

The existence of maths communicators @jamesgrime and @ClaraGrima implies the existence of maths communicators Antonio Grimo, Tippi Grimi, and Lulu Grimu

@UniofNewcastle why are you retweeting NFT spam? twitter.com/RadRugsApp/sta…

@jimwaterson @undertheraedar @cesigno That entry seems to be for the greggs in the shopping centre in Cramlington, which isn't particularly close to that farm: ratings.food.gov.uk/business/en-GB…
I wonder if that one's a franchise?

@BernhardWerner Recently I found this slide from a talk I gave 6 years ago. I still haven't given CindyJS a proper go. I really must!

Using what-colour-is-that.glitch.me to decode a paper which assumes much more colour vision than I have.
Even though I made the app, I still don't believe those colours are different!

(the paper is Bill Gosper's "Rectangle Arithmetic", by the way - gosper.org/rectarith12.pdf)

2023 will be your year, I'm sure, @Samuel_Hansen twitter.com/abel_prize/sta…

Dan gets it. Be more like Dan. twitter.com/dan_rust/statu…

@edsouthall Is this all the same building?

@edsouthall What's the address? I'm curious to see the satellite view

@peterrowlett @Helenintgarden I actually had some good chat with @robeastaway and @SparksMaths today about *something* I could do for the #BigMathOff, but I'd be surprised if it was amenable to a sticker book

@SparksMaths here's the 3d printing guide I was talking about yesterday: mas.ncl.ac.uk/3dprintguide/

@JanvierUK yikes! I'd suggest going outside, but I know you disapprove of The Outdoors

@MiniGirlGeek @standupmaths And: did you grow the beard specifically for the joke?

@honeypisquared Are you aware of @knotunknot and her "the mathematician's shirts" project?

What's the next term in this sequence?

1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 4, 2, 5, 1, 6, 2, 3, 7, 8, 4, 3, 1, 9, 2, 10, 5

What's the pattern?

#IHaveAnAnswer

No takers, so here's a big hint:

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,...
1,2,1,3,4,2,5,6,3,7,8,4,...
1,2,1,3,1,4,2,5,6,2,3,7,8,4,3,...

@preetster so what's the next term?

@the_happyproton @HigherGeometer

@dennisprangle Wow, that's a solid positive! Hope it's not too bad for you

@SophieBays *waves across the river*

@yet_so_far My guess would be getting pregnant again immediately after giving birth. I suppose the danger is that not everything has healed?

@CardColm Jog on the spot while riding it from end to end? A reference frame marathon

@JanvierUK The girl and I have an African countries song, prompted by exactly this thought while looking at the world map poster in the kitchen. It peters out a bit when it gets to "the democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Congo again but not as democratic"

@CAfolabi @revdavetubby @Tunde901 @TracyShildrick @ProfJSanders It's hard to turn down good grub, but I wouldn't be able to get into town and back for baby bathtime.

It's always a good day to tell people about @tesseralis's fab polyhedra page twitter.com/jemmaths/statu…

@jjsanderson US customs love telling you off, though. If it wasn't your laptop, it'd be something else!

Rediscovered this intriguingly spare OEIS entry: oeis.org/A033875
You'll never guess what the 22nd term is!

I have made a new maths t-shirt design! If you can bear to pay Redbubble's prices, you can strut around town with a niche maths reference on your front: redbubble.com/shop/ap/115207…

@ESMathTeacher There's Something About Voting

@neeldhara There's a nice fractal sequence you can generate with a pack of cards: faculty.evansville.edu/ck6/integer/fr…
Lots of list manipulation if you want to do it in code

Idea: app that tells the weather on Tyneside by counting how often people tweet images with a sarcastic caption "it's grim up north"

@peterrowlett @alisonkiddle I'd never heard of that spire before, and when I drove past it at Easter I nearly crashed the car!

@peterrowlett @alisonkiddle sounds similar to how I feel a bit uneasy if I can't see Penshaw Monument somewhere on the horizon. Psychic geography and all that

People who know linear algebra: if I said "make a block diagonal from these matrices", would you know what I meant?
How about "augmented matrix"?
And is there a term for when you put one matrix on top of another?

@yet_so_far thanks! Someone on mastodon said Sage uses 'stack', so I'll go with that

*the sound of optimization theory lecturers worldwide writing their next homework* twitter.com/mrchrisaddison…

The Axis of Tory MP Nominative Determinism:

James Cleverly
.
.
.
Chris Pincher

@ZoeLGriffiths Towards the Pincher end of the scale

The youngest did a huge poo in his nappy; after many decreasingly plausible denials finally admitted there's a poo in his nappy; then insisted he didn't want to change nappies.

Now let's turn on the news...

@helenarney Me! Any chance of a 5am gig to distract the endlessly crying baby?

@helenarney @FranChadhaDay

@remiangot @GangWiMS Cela me rappelle: avez-vous vu les nouveaux "custom input methods" en @NclNumbas? numbas.org.uk/blog/2022/03/d…

@alephJamesA @StEdmundHall 🥳

@remiangot @GangWiMS @NclNumbas Ouais, on peut faire un 'part type' dont la méthode de saisie est un iframe MathALEA, puis attendre à un message envoyé avec postMessage dans 'pre_submit_tasks'

@fionabarras1 @NewCycling @KidicalMassNE @NthTyneCycleSoc @NewcastleCC @NTCouncilTeam Yes, I've tried to cycle from Whitley Bay to Newcastle a few times, and there's always a point where I go "this doesn't feel right!"
I can't think what the plan would ever have been to get to Riding Sun - there's no avoiding the Holystone roundabout

@CardColm So it *is* possible to make something with fourfold rotational symmetry and no reflections without it looking immediately like a swastika!

@d_yellowlees Heard our eurovision entry booming out of a car window yesterday and appreciated it, so not that

Does anyone want to watch me spend 22 minutes fixing a bug in @NclNumbas?
youtube.com/watch?v=3dmerD…

Is the statement "Newcastle is a gateway to the rest of the UK" equivalent to "Newcastle is on the national rail network"?

What measure for connectivity does Newcastle do best at? It feels like the claim here is something like it minimises "max(time to major city)" twitter.com/NGinitiative/s…

@icecolbeveridge indeed!

@LucasVB I like this!

@Thalesdisciple Ah yes, the law of Chekhov's Worksheet

@DavidKButlerUoA Yes!

I had an idea about how to make a binary clock entirely in CSS, with no JavaScript.
A nice bit of mental exercise for the train to work!
css-binary-clock.glitch.me

@b0rk When I have a deep data structure that I want to watch, I sometimes set a watch expression which runs it through a function to produce a representative string - much easier to interpret

@DanielColquitt No way! That is serious business. The top temperature predicted up here is 29

Boring: put chillies in everything

Tell me more: put everything in chillies

youtu.be/PvXEwy18bIg

@benorlin @peterrowlett @stecks In more ways than one, your book was the elephant in the room

Didn't think I'd see Zog slash fic on my tl today twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/…

@miclugo I love that she's still doing this

@ESMathTeacher If it helps, upper class English people have been saying "ain't" for centuries

@bauhws @JimPropp That only works on self-hosted WordPress sites. Jim's blog is on WordPress.com

@johncarlosbaez @JimPropp Yes, as @johncarlosbaez says, you probably want 𝛼

@ShriramKMurthi I get pro-saudi ads similar to this in the UK (or at least, I did until I muted them)

@Pyfagorass All it's missing is a number given relative to another unstated quantity

My employer: decolonisation is high on our agenda

Also my employer: look at our fantastic Malaysia and Singapore campuses!!! 🤩

@kyledevans The most recent example I can think of: 4*TOWN in the film "Turning Red" has five members

@NTyneLivingSt @NTCouncilTeam @activetraveleng my mum lives along there, so I drive and cycle round that roundabout quite often. It doesn't feel great either way! The Broadway is a busy road but you're right that there doesn't need to be anywhere near as much tarmac as there is

@XenaProject @RiccardoBrasca What are the dots? Theorems in Lean?

My first question on seeing this: how does the Duke of Northumberland, the owner of Alnwick Castle, stand to benefit from Newcastle being chosen? I guess rent or land sales twitter.com/alnwickcastle/…

@yet_so_far On average, quite far apart, but near LA, quite close together 🤷‍♂️
Near me, Newcastle and Teesside International airports are 60km apart. Flying between them in a private jet would take about 4 minutes

@yet_so_far I've seen elsewhere that the owners probably aren't on these flights: the planes are being moved either for maintenance or to be closer to the passengers.
I suppose if you've got money to literally burn, saving yourself a 40 minute drive to the big airport is worthwhile

so when Valerie Singleton's mum got married, she stopped being a singleton and became a Singleton.

Any other instances of nominative capitalisation in history?

@SLSingh Congratulations! I think The Code Book was the first non-textbook maths book I owned.
I'm pleased the IMA continues to award the Zeeman medal only to Good Eggs

@soupie66 of course!

@katie_panda is this an official set?!

@monsoon0 @AKWhitney aperiodical.com/2017/10/stupid…

@edsouthall

@BernhardWerner take this seriously! I had two bouts of sciatica while my kids were learning to walk, and recovering from it was a lot harder than preventing it!

@edsouthall You're not that much older than me, are you? Farthing Wood was my first thought

@edsouthall the single cutest experience of my life was unexpectedly seeing a baby stoat on a cycle path. So tiny! So round!

Writing unit tests is a really good way of finding typos in your code. Who knew?

"average person proves 3 theorems a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person proves 0 theorems per year. Carl Gauss, who lives in cave & proves over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

@ZoeLGriffiths @edsouthall We said that about my daughter, and at nearly 5, she's still got very blonde hair

@edsouthall My sister-in-law, during the short time that she was a barmaid, poured a pint of whiskey.

@josstified I just can't see whose vote he's trying to get. Mean-spirited people who voted Tory last time, but somehow would switch to labour instead of the lib dems?

There's no angle from which a dodecahedron looks like a regular solid.

I'm organising a series of online public maths talks through @NCLMathsStats to be delivered by disabled presenters, taking place this December.
Talks can be any mathy topic, or about your experience as a disabled mathematician.
I need speakers: dm me if interested!

@NCLMathsStats To give some idea of what I'm looking for, I'll use myself as an example.
I count myself disabled at least four ways: I'm colourblind, autistic, dyspraxic, and have Ehlers-Danlos.
I might talk about:

@NCLMathsStats 1) use of colour in mathematical communication; how red chalk makes chalk-and-talks inaccessible
2) how ambiguously-worded maths problems have stymied me in the past, and how to write them more clearly
3) the word problem in group theory, which is just something I'm interested in

@OUMathsStats @NCLMathsStats yep: christian.perfect@ncl.ac.uk

@NCLMathsStats This came about because I and some other disabled people who do maths talks got tired of missing out on opportunities to do outreach because it involves travelling.

If you're interested in taking part, either dm me or email christian.perfect@ncl.ac.uk

@rasjor That's new to me, thanks!

@neheritagelib It's a superb name

@DrCaroSummers @scienceatlife Thanks for reminding me that we talked about going this summer! I haven't been in years, and none of the other L-Ps have been at all

@HedronApp Nah, looks weird

@stecks are you aware of this robot-themed diner? twitter.com/MrPJEvans/stat…

@SophieBays Deservedly so! I still dig out your videos to talk about probability things with non-maths people

@CardColm with the graphicx package, you can do \rotatebox, but why do you want to do this?

Here's an example on overleaf: overleaf.com/read/ryrxjqbxn…

@CardColm phew!

I've booked my place! twitter.com/BigMathsJam/st…

@matthras do it!

👀

@profRoys We used to have those things here. There's nothing to stop Scottish tories taking them away after independence

@pwr2dppl My snototter's not tottering on the foreshore, for sure
(how much of that works in your accent?)

@ch_nira @aperiodical Best poorly-thought-out plan I've ever put into action. You've made it your own thing!

Are you disabled? Do you like talking about maths?
I'm still looking for a few more presenters for a series of public maths talks.
Thanks to everyone who's offered so far. twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

@gazza_d crikey, how fast do you pedal? It takes me over an hour to do the 8ish miles into Newcastle from Whitley Bay

@gazza_d hat's off to you!

Does anyone know if it's possible to get google maps or openstreetmap or similar to plot a route between two places, and show where you'd be at regular time intervals? Like, where you'd be after 5 mins, 10 mins, etc.

@glitch alpha61.com/primenumbershi…

@GermanQuatsch Would "from year dot" be a closer translation?

@ch_nira @aperiodical Why on earth would I mind?
I'd love to do another one, but it's a lot of admin. When my kids are bigger...

@GerardWesty31 That sounds a lot like the symmetries of the Herschel enneahedron! Now I need to look for sevens in it

@alephJamesA Call it PhD by reputation. I'm quietly campaigning for it to be a recognised means of qualifying

@icecolbeveridge @BigMathsJam Quite pleased with myself that I remembered which year that was: mathsjam.com/assets/talks/2…

@SparksMaths @panlepan degenerate, naughty hexagons

@SparksMaths @panlepan @geogebra is there an easy way in geogebra of creating a periodic tiling of a given shape?

@panlepan @SparksMaths @geogebra thanks!

@panlepan @SparksMaths @geogebra is there a way to make the algebra editor not hateful? Like, don't delete everything between parentheses when I delete one parenthesis, and move sensibly with the arrow keys? It's set up for moving around 2D notation, but doesn't really manage it

@SparksMaths @panlepan @geogebra I think the root of the problems with the app's input is that it won't allow a syntactically incorrect expression at any point, so if you write or delete one parenthesis it necessarily has to add or remove the matching one. An incorrect constraint, I'd say!

@pwr2dppl I don't think I've seen that format, so I'm confused squared

@pwr2dppl My experience of following you here is like 50% "oh, that's an interesting point" and 50% no idea even what realm of human endeavour it's about!

@pwr2dppl (not a complaint)

@robinhouston @panlepan @Simon_Gregg @HypercubicPeg @geogebra @zarahkhussain Those look like silhouettes of cubes to me

@d_yellowlees I've been up for three hours, Duncan. I'm ready to do Wednesday

@jjsanderson @DrLucyRogers I was about to make a quip about finding a public transport service using vehicles older than the tyne and wear metro, but wikipedia says they're still making new hovercraft!

@jjsanderson @DrLucyRogers I heard the first one's starting in October. Can't wait!

@jjsanderson this page says the first new train will run in November: nexus.org.uk/newmetrotrains

@jjsanderson oh no it doesn't, I can't read. It arrives for testing in November this year, and enters service November next year. Good grief!

@MattPDickinson lucky dog! Ours surprised us by having a lovely snooze in the car the whole way.
Are you prepared for how dogs can't go indoors where food is served in Ireland?

@accessibleweb It's really fraught with autism! Some people insist it's "has autism", others that it's "is autistic".

@JM_Field5 Twitter put this tweet next to one from someone showing the literally millennia of rubbish they pulled out of the Thames, including neolithic arrowheads and medieval hairpins. Surprised it was only an ear parasite!

@JM_Field5 True fact

@DrCaroSummers @Usborne Oh, I love those! I think we have a couple somewhere

@DrCaroSummers @Usborne If you can bear it, they print those awful sticker dolly books in French. Haven't looked for anything bilingual yet!

@jjaron they're selling our own experiences back to us. they're taking us for absolute fools

@Smylers2 I've noticed nationwide have started doing lots more authentication checks recently. I'll take an abundance of caution, given the arms race of ways to scam online payments

@Smylers2 I agree it seems to do the wrong thing fairly often, but I can believe it's a really hard thing to get right, and being more transparent about how it works would only help scammers.
Frustrating all round!

@HigherGeometer if you're using wordpress.com, you won't be able to use that plugin. And if you're on a host that can use plugins, you might as well use MathJax

@HigherGeometer having said that, something's not right on your site: wordpress is adding the fg and bg parameters to your latex, which suggests it's trying to automatically work them out. Is there anything in the appearance tab of the admin to set fg and bg colours?

The good thing about @sangwinc doing basically the same job as me in a different place is that every now and then he heckles me in GitHub issues github.com/numbas/Numbas/…

@libraryncl Sh-boom! Now there's a deep(-ly satisfying) cut!

@icecolbeveridge @robeastaway Blackfriars to tower bridge is a good walk! I also recommend it

@JimPropp "nine-thousand-pound"? How many tons is that? I thought the point of customary measures was that you have a weird word for any order of magnitude!
(not asking you to justify the USA's continued use of the worst measuring system)

@miclugo @JimPropp as long as it minimises abs(log(scalar part)), it works for me

@samholloway @SamHartburn @Beamish_Museum I'm just learning now that these tiles aren't everywhere!

@tim_hosgood Somebody opened the chair catalogue, closed the chair catalogue, and said "yes."

!!! twitter.com/bbcstrictly/st…

@samholloway @SamHartburn @Beamish_Museum I think I've seen them in Newcastle. Can't think where exactly, though

What is ableism? It's this line on Alnwick Gardens's "visit us" page:
"you are able to park anywhere other than the first tier which is reserved for Blue Badge holders only"
Do Blue Badge holders infer that the rest of the page isn't written for them, either?

(By all accounts they do a very good job of inclusion and accessibility once you're there. This just leapt out at me as badly written copy!)

@robinhouston This week, on Tales of Global Search and Replace

@robinhouston Be the cexecutee you want to see in the world

@ch_nira @MelroseStewart1 I mis-parsed that at first and I was like "Mountains? Near Birmingham?!"

It's back! @TweetsofCushing and I reviewed an integer sequence, and along the way we accidentally reviewed like half a dozen others. twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

The thaMographe needs to be a bigger deal than it is. It solves a genuine problem! It's better than a pair of compasses and a protractor! twitter.com/thamographe/st…

@ptwiddle @edsouthall As long as the next page doesn't talk about the square lattice, they'll get away with that definition!
I'm looking forward to mine being old enough for Geometry Juniors

Where's door number 1? How do you know?

@El_Timbre @mrsdenyer @ikklewol87 Jaipur is very good

@ShriramKMurthi What would the American equivalents of names like Bertie Wooster and Tuppy Glossop be?
Who fills the category of feckless wealth-haver in US society?

@Jeuducalisson1 J'ai eu mal à comprendre les règles quand je considérais juste les arêtes, mais je l'ai trouvé beaucoup plus facile après j'ai réalisé qu'on peut remplir les lozenges avant de faire les arêtes.

@steveparks @jjaron The name sounds familiar, it might be the same guy. I found this one from March this year about chip butties - itv.com/news/central/2…

@JanvierUK Yeah, selection bias goes both ways!

To answer your question: yes, lots of the time

@ntu_research @drjameshind Does it matter that the formula is nonsense?

Odd experience to join @OMathsJam for the first time in a year and my game is in the Shout!
It's somethingorotherwhatever.com/this-island-is…

@kyledevans How much of aperiodical.com/category/colum… have you read?

Zoinks! I just checked my salary. If UK higher education salaries had increased with inflation since 2009 I would now be earning £9,768.25 more per year. ucu.org.uk/HEpaymodeller #ucuRISING

(challenge for the keen beans: work out my current pay)

I did it again with the same current salary but 40 hours per week, and it said the same amount more. So I think it only asks for your hours worked to calculate an hourly rate. I wonder why it doesn't say what your hourly rate should be if it kept up with inflation

@LotoshaBrown @wacnt nice! Well done digging this up

In case you were wondering, 153 is the smallest integer whose factorial has two zeros after the leading digit. It *just* fits in a tweet - see below twitter.com/LotoshaBrown/s…

153! = 200634390509568239477828874698911718566246149616161171934231099284840946025238092339613294062603588435530393145048663047173051913507711632216305667129554900620296603188543122491838966881134795135997316305640071571629943041039657861120000000000000000000000000000000000000

this has generated a *superb* integer sequence which isn't yet in the OEIS and I am rapidly submitting

Just triggered an existential panic in Mrs L-P by showing her this screen

@icecolbeveridge you're right, I only need an approximation!

@icecolbeveridge but Stirling's approximation doesn't seem to be close enough, unless I've misunderstood. And Python doesn't like making massive floats, so I have to be clever twice

@icecolbeveridge can I see your code?

@icecolbeveridge flaunting your coding skills and your kids' reasonable breakfast time at me. The cheek!

@icecolbeveridge oh, of course!

@icecolbeveridge could you make the counting-zeros bit quicker by chopping off the leading digit, then computing log10 of what's left?

@icecolbeveridge so what you're saying is you don't have seven 9s uptime?

@icecolbeveridge can you add any extra terms you get to oeis.org/draft/A356739 ?

@gregeganSF having spent most of yesterday watching dd copy 1TB of empty data from one disk to another, this is weirdly relatable

@icecolbeveridge I have half a mind to try this in constructive real arithmetic, where you say how many decimal places you want, and it automatically does the calculation only to the required accuracy. My implementation isn't designed for speed, though

@algorithmachine "how could we possibly reduce our APC????"

@NTCouncilTeam I had no idea there were places to recycle small electricals apart from the big tip. Thanks!

The problem with recycling batteries is that I get through them so slowly that by the time I've got enough to justify a trip to the recycling point, they've been sat on the shelf so long I feel I'll miss them when they're gone.

I might be over-thinking things.

@pwr2dppl That's not a matrix, it's a lucky dip bag of numbers

Over on mathstodon, I've been thinking about shoddy, awful devices for drawing circles and lines, featuring @thamographe as the least-shoddy, least-awful device I've ever used
mathstodon.xyz/@christianp/10…

It culminated in this nice chalk drawing

@two_star May I suggest @aperiodical, where you're definitely not taking up anyone else's space

Today we're at the beach, but I forgot to bring any string. So here's the biggest triangle (@BiggestTriangle) I could manage to make by eye.
In the background is the "equilateral" triangle I tried to make by enlarging one made from two bucket outlines

@a1gebrandis There are new episodes?!

@neheritagelib You mean, better in every way?

I've found a route to the shops that goes over the railway once and under it once. I feel like those should cancel out to give a route that doesn't cross the railway at all

@aavanderleer Preparing plans for a Reidemeister move - sorry, bypass road - for the council to consider

Cycled to Silverlink shops with the girl. As far as I can tell, there are no bike hoops anywhere on the enormous site. Yes it's on the A19 so it's easy to drive to, but it's also on the waggonway so it's pretty convenient to bike to as well!

good job it's not 2020 any more because there'd be a million tweeted images of solidarity-themed sourdough loaves tagged #ucuRISING twitter.com/ucu/status/156…

@robinhouston looks like a bus seat pattern from the 90s!

@monsoon0 Brummies: "we've got the tallest free standing clock tower in the world"

Me: "why does nobody else think that's a good idea?"

@monsoon0 yes, I was just reading that. Surely there's someone trained in surveying on campus who can settle that?

@CardColm With names like Cuthbert and Collingwood he's probably from my neck of the woods

My son is 2 next week. His favourite things are cars and the colour pink. His sister wants to get him a pink toy car. Can I find a pink toy car under £10? I can not!
What do I need to search for? Any suggestions?

I believe in you internet strangers

@karenshancock I think he's still a bit young for the small pieces, and the cheapest barbie car I can find is nearly £20!

@Smylers2 Ahh, that looks great, thanks!

@jjsanderson Whomst for up-turning was nullsome

@ClaraGrima

The functional analysis gang all went out for lunch yesterday and they didn't call it luncheonal analysis.
What is wrong with them

@peterrowlett @cetl_msor2022 I'm in the #SadlyNoOnlineAttendance gang too.

International Expand Your One-Sentence Email To Give Some Context For Whatever It Is You're On About Day

@Cshearer41 @mrsouthernmaths @MathsTechnology @kyledevans @Mathematical_A teachers, how do you feel about LCD slates like amazon.co.uk/Richgv-Writing… ? I started using one for working-out a couple of years ago, and it's saved me so much paper and ink!

International Not Prefacing Your Manifestly Quick Question With "Quick Question" Month

@peterrowlett Nice! Did you bang your head on the low beam and get a discount?

@peterrowlett Ahh, I thought I'd told you about it! On the ground floor there's a really small bit under the stairs, and a cross beam with a sign saying something like "if your dad bangs his head on this beam you can have £3 off"

@pwr2dppl This place seems impossibly fancy for an event where, to be frank, you can expect plenty of attendees to be quite idiosyncratic about what they eat

@XenaProject It annoys me how much easier this is to understand

Can't wait for my savings account to mature with its whopping 0.5% interest rate.
How the world has changed in a year!

@robinhouston OpenSCAD is a decent open source option for certain kinds of thing.
In blender, if you stick to manipulating things by typing instead of using the mouse, you can maintain precision

@robinhouston @_tim_hutton_ There's a chemical engineer at my work whose entire research workflow for 3d printed chemistry doodads goes through SketchUp. I think there are some addons involved, but I was surprised to see it!

I made myself a bowl of tuna mayo in advance, knowing I'd be too low on spoons to make it after tiny L-P's birthday party this morning. I just dropped it all in the sink 😭

@robinhouston @LucasVB I think for that kind of thing, you might as well make up lists of coordinates in code. In python, I had an alright time with SolidPython, which wraps OpenSCAD

@jjsanderson Omg!!! Is it pink?

I'm not saying that I spent all day tiring the kids out so that they'd be asleep in time for me to attend the @WBayLabour trigger ballot meeting, but I am saying that they're both conked out and it doesn't start for another ten minutes

Apparently it's #ColourblindAwarenessDay.
Just now, I didn't know if the dark smudge on my son's leg was mud or blood. It's a proper disability which can have serious consequences!

(I licked it. It was mud)

@ColourBlindVis Thanks. I've used those, then made my own to suit my needs - what-colour-is-that.glitch.me
Whipping out my phone to load an app isn't that easy when holding a screaming toddler, though

@soupie66 twitter.com/christianp/sta…

@WilliamDeringer I have a rule of thumb that I should never let a computer measure time spent doing anything. They're really bad at it!

@CihanPostsThms Eugh, internet people! I've really enjoyed following this account, seeing some theorems I recognise and learning about new ones. Thank you!

@monsoon0 Because you expected a higher proportion to be built up, or because you expected a higher proportion to be unfarmed?

@monsoon0 I had the same experience in the Netherlands. Is this an observation bias situation? You see land with more people on more often, so that shapes your expectation

@Thalesdisciple Analogies with the "I declare myself to be on the outside" joke about a mathematician

@DavidKButlerUoA Numbers! The number of times I've had arguments about whether it's OK to write a numeric answer to a question in a certain form...

This is one of the reasons why I don't like entirely in-person conferences. Needing a visa excludes so many people twitter.com/j_vechbany/sta…

Hushed conversations taking place in the Palace after courtiers read her will and discovered she's asked for her funeral to end to "Angels" by Robbie Williams

@d_yellowlees for me, the most unsettling feeling before a presentation is when I *don't* feel nervous - usually a sign that I'm not about to do my best work

Dutch pals: is this caravan called "fancy chicken"?

An innovative answer to the question "how can I get round the fact this puzzle has more than one solution?" twitter.com/robeastaway/st…

@mathpaul Amazing

@icecolbeveridge @SparksMaths @mathladyhazel There's a phrase worth coining!
Feeble nachos: a spurious maths factoid

e.g. "the rocks at the giant's causeway are all perfect hexagons? That's feeble nachos"

@icecolbeveridge I've heard the fission chips is good

@JM_Field5 Something to do with heat?

@blkmathmagic I wouldn't be surprised to find they're doing arbitrage on reimbursements somehow

I have just by accident discovered an amazing podcast: the National Plastering Council's "Smooth Finish" podcast
npcpodcast.libsyn.com/website

@jjaron Can I get away with saying it depends on context?

@jjaron False tetrachotomy

@Andrew_Taylor I have a vague memory of playing a Noddy game with the same mechanic, but that might have been later

@stecks Nice! I wish my plotter hadn't died. I think I need to get a new servo, but who knows?

@icecolbeveridge I know how to do this! I can make an example for you in the week, but not today

@icecolbeveridge @alisonkiddle @SparksMaths @SamHartburn Good stuff! If you're free on Friday, we could meet in the mathsjam pub and talk through it?

@NTyneLivingSt @NTCouncilTeam I cycled down there last week and I wasn't happy about being unexpectedly forced out onto the main road!

@clopenmic @SamHartburn @Ayliean this is really good!

That carriage ain't getting picked up

The number of open issues on the @NclNumbas repository is down to 100! 🥳`

github.com/numbas/Numbas/…

I'm wary of directing people to activities that just look like a guy doing a thing on his own, but Simon isn't just any guy, he's got some excellent helpers, and he's been doing this for a few years now.

So: if you have a kid who wants to do More Maths, show them this! twitter.com/SLSingh/status…

@SamHartburn @icecolbeveridge @macaronique Here I am, late as always,
Doggedly Entering Twitter Entertainments, Recapitulating Mirth In Naming Ants, Not Termites

@jjsanderson Did you ever go to Le Normand, behind the Gate in Newcastle? "just galettes" is a hard concept to sell, but they were so good!

@jjsanderson Was that the one in the grainger market? I walked past a couple of times but never had a crêpe

@jjsanderson Omg, I've just remembered my rich friend booked them for a house party so I've had loads!

Was: NP-Complete

Now: Dif-and-only-ificult

Apparently there's a documentary about infinity coming out on Netflix on Monday: netflix.com/gb/title/81273…

@timchartier Last year I came up with a nice lullaby sequence. It's more interesting than just counting but easier than the primes. I still use it to sing my son to sleep!
aperiodical.com/2021/07/a-lull…

@theclairodactyl @ColinTheMathmo So *that's* what's at the end of a rainbow!

@peterrowlett Fermi problem? Sounds like a fer you problem

@JanvierUK Never mind resignations, there'd be talk of a coup!

@gazza_d I was genuinely confused by this when I cycled to south shields for the first time, via the ferry. Do you really have to take such a circuitous route to get to the seafront?

Hypermobility is remembering you don't wear *those* jeans because when you bend your legs they push your knee out of its socket

@HypercubicPeg Yes!

@yet_so_far Gives a new meaning to "Mersey Beat"

@FakeUnicode twitter.com/christianp/sta…

Microsoft Word: now that ordinal is a superscript! You're welcome!

Also Word: now everything is superscript! You're completely welcome!

Video description: I type "Monday December 12th", and the "th" is converted to a superscript when I go to the next line. Then I put the cursor at the end of the "th", start a new line, and the text "But I have done the forbidden thing" is also in superscript

@MalawiVillan Rest assured, if I could choose, I wouldn't be using word

@JSEllenberg and N is 💖 whatever your heart desires 💖

@pwr2dppl "teacher left me alone with my thoughts" is quite a bleak criticism!

@icecolbeveridge How long did Javid last? I feel like that wasn't long either

The urge when faced with a minor feature request to retreat to the woods and spend the next decade rewriting all your stuff in @elmlang

That kW has to be a typo, right?

"it's a bit chilly today, better put the space heater on for a bit"

very droll, Argos

@icecolbeveridge @Andrew_Taylor "excuse me, is this API vegan?"

@JanvierUK Oh dear! Maybe the squirrel will be your friend now

I have a new #OEIS sequence: "a(n) is the smallest k such that k! has at least n consecutive zeros immediately after the leading digit in base 10."
oeis.org/A356739