Today I am mainly failing at basic geometry.

If you see an interesting & mathsy article (blog, video, podcast ep, whatever) posted in November don't forget to submit it to the Carnival of Maths in time for December's edition! https://aperiodical.com/carnival-of-mathematics/

It's getting towards the end of the year and I was only on April of my page-a-day notepad, so of course I had to make an origami dodecahedron.

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@christianp/115513241960494245 It worked!

About to update mathstodon.xyz to v4.5...

Good deed for the day done: I swept up the glass on the cycle path outside Spanish City that's been there for a week. It was a whole bottle's worth, across both lanes of the path. Pity I then didn't have time to get my bike ride done, but at least I've had […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

The tides are fairly predictable, aren't they? So why am I having so much trouble finding a predicted tide time for next May? @sarahdalgulls, do you know where I should look?

Another day in Outlook: the "From" line is so long that it pushed the reply button off the edge.

argggggg, crawlers are the worst! Fool me for not setting up a robots.txt, I suppose.

I have quite a strong colour vision deficiency. One way it affects me is that I often miss red text on a dark or green background. I used to have an app on my phone that would shift colours from the camera, so that I could at least see where the colour changes, if not give it a name. At some […]

wow, the Safari dev tools are so slow. Sad for me that I'm debugging a Safari-only bug.

It's the 4th of November and it's t-shirt weather. Aaaaaaaaaaa we broke the planet aaaaaaaaaa

Can anyone help me with this #openscad problem? How do I rotate an object to face a given normal vector? I know mathematically how to do it, but I'm lost in a maze of coordinate systems.

I'm on a train adventure with the 5-year-old. We're trying to take as many different kinds of train as we can, up to Edinburgh and back. Currently on train number 2, a zooma

Another kid told me that if you walk around its perimeter three times backwards at midnight, it'll tile periodically.

Just ordered an actual CD, for what must be the first time in like a decade. A single came up on shuffle, and I realised I never bought the album. 12 years later, it's £1.47 from Music Magpie, compared to £6.99 for MP3s. Artificial scarcity is nonsense.

Maybe this could work??? #beachspectres

Turns out using the recommended temperatures for the filament really makes a difference. Who knew? 🤷 #3dprinting

#beachspectre ice cream?

#beachspectres update 2: it's all joining together! I've spent some time in Inkscape and worked out that I can cut up the monotile into just a few, repeating pieces. I hope I can get the joins to be strong enough. https://media.aperiodical.com/beach-spectres-update-2

Well, I've spent a couple of hours playing with Rye (https://ryelang.org/) because somehow REBOL was one of the first programming languages I ever used, and I've had to give up. It looks like some major things about the language have changed recently, so the examples on the website don't work […]

#beachspectres update 2: it's all joining together! I've spent some time in Inkscape and worked out that I can cut up the monotile into just a few, repeating pieces. I hope I can get the joins to be strong enough. https://media.aperiodical.com/beach-spectres-update-2

Tired: reducing the expression to one proved in a known theorem. Wired: nostalgebra

#beachspectres update: I'm taking it very seriously.

Schauen wir uns mal den #iPhone #taschenrechner (wissenschaftlicher Modus!) an. 🧵 Dieser Rechner kennt ganz viele „Sonderergebnisse“, wie zum Beispiel „nicht definiert“ wenn man 2/0 rechnen will.

don't need to look at the weather forecast to find out when the storm is coming, because the times of Octopus free electricity sessions already tell me

Going to attempt some audience interaction in a seminar presentation delivered over Teams. Wish me luck.

Having small kids is like working in an escape room - constantly resetting rooms, only for everything to be cast into chaos again minutes later

I've just discovered that the UK Department for Education has made this excellent site about accessibility in education: https://accessibility.education.gov.uk/

I'm trying to be clever and use the new #css @property declarations. Is it intentional that the "<length>" syntax only allows absolute units such as px and cm, and not relative lengths such as em and lh?

I'm surprised it took this long for someone to email me saying "I asked ChatGPT to make some @numbas questions for me, how do I import this file it made?" (of course, the file is in a completely made up format and ChatGPT confabulated an interface for uploading it)

The days are getting darker, so the bucket bike lights are back in action! (yes, I'll ensure I comply with regulations when riding on the road...) #CargoBike #BikeTooter

Is there a public list of certificates granted by Let's Encrypt? Seconds after using certbot to get a certificate on a new domain, which hasn't been linked to from anywhere, I saw requests to URLs like "/.env" and "/.git/config".

Who decided to call it a tricorn and not an equihateral?

mathstodon.xyz is now running Mastodon 4.4.7. Looks like just a couple of bug fixes. I think the next upgrade will be to 4.5, which will allow quote posts. If this is news to you, see https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/09/introducing-quote-posts/

Today I learnt about the path division tool in Inkscape: cut up one shape using another. https://logosbynick.com/slice-objects-in-inkscape/ This will be very useful!

ooooooh, very satisfying: called to work on an item with database ID 11235 :fibonacci:

Back down to 100 open issues on the @numbas repo: https://github.com/numbas/Numbas/issues 😅

Argggggggg I have a unit test that fails only when GitHub Actions runs it. Even using act (https://nektosact.com/) to run the action locally, using an environment as close as possible to GitHub Actions, it passes. What???? If anybody is feeling clever and helpful and has an idea how to solve […]

Why is it that I'm happy to spend a couple of days preparing, and a day travelling, to give an academic presentation to half a dozen people, but if I spend an hour making a video and it only gets a couple of hundred views I feel it was a waste of time? Is it that I don't know *who* the video […]

It's #TilingTuesday so I thought I'd do a quick update on how the planning for the #BeachSpectres #megagrant#beachspectres#tilingtuesdayroject is going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPNAvWYWOUw

If you don't make the transformers noises when pulling your pants down to sit on the loo, you must have missed the 80s

[work subtoot] Quite a thing to misgender a colleague in your email promoting the trans solidarity meeting! At least they're trying...

I hate doing the vector arithmetic for multitouch pan and zoom, so why do I keep doing it?

Asked my pal from Somerset if he knew anyone capable of taking the square root of -𝑟². "I are!" he said. That's a proof by country diction.

Right. End of the week. 90 minutes to plough through as many flagged emails as I can.

@ColinTheMathmo I need your train ticket advice! The boy and I want to have a train adventure day, taking as many different trains as possible up to Edinburgh. I've found a specific set of trains. Is there a more efficient way of booking the ticekts than going through the order form on […]

Uh oh, they're letting me use the laser cutter.

I came across this great app called Aubin, "an autism friendly travel companion". http://aubin.app/ The main purpose is it's a journey planner. You can tell it things like how much you prefer different kinds of transport, how much time you want to wait at a station, whether you'd prefer a […]

OH: "Bist du morgen im Büro?" "Nee, ich kann nicht. Muss arbeiten."