An hour-long digression later, I now have a tool to search for unicode characters by semantic similarity. I'm using emoji/unicode characters as placeholder icons for a user interface, so I've been struggling to use a combination of literal search on character […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Imagine a world in which Des Lynam runs a huge podcasting empire

I'm about to do some work on one of the mathstodon.xyz servers. It *shouldn't* affect how things run, but you never know, so I just thought I'd say I'm doing it. (I'm upgrading some work servers and thought I might as well do similar things on mathstodon while I'm in apt-land)

gahhh, one thing I hate about ubuntu is that if you install a yy.10 release and forget to update promptly, they just delete all the upgrade files so you're stuck

hah, there's something that must have caused a headache: when translating a page from German to English, Firefox's translation tool splits a link on the words "bekannt ist" into two links, because "is" and "known" in the English version aren't next to each other.

Cursed notation left: →↦↑

Idea: a co-TTRPG. The computer gives lines of input, and you have to write the response

I really hope the person who made the "goose was not valued" slides sees the funny side

I'm a day and a bit into trying to rewrite the @numbas editor frontend with vue.js. It's got all the awkwardness of #elmlang - have to be careful about how data changes; reusable components have quite a bit of boilerplate - but none of the flexibility of a functional language. I'll just do it […]

Alex Violette writes on the SeqFan mailing list: "I have come to announce that the first Hyperperfect NOT of the form 3ᵏ⁻¹⋅(3ᵏ − 2) has been found! It is 321210648228113097833688328004214356646685508531160153551637 = 3¹⁶ × 129140227×256572153302107 × 225205396855537107298933866373." This […]

Idea: railroad diagrams for parsers drawn in the style of Richard Scarry's Busy Town

Here's a difficult estimation question, I think: Which number is bigger - the number of bubbles in a glass of Coke in the hour that starts when it's poured, or the number of operations carried out by a phone's processor in one millisecond?

I've just refilled the pepper grinder and only spilled one peppercorn, which I caught in a plate. Unprecedented levels of competence from CP.

The electricians have sent me a USB stick "handover pack" with all the documentation to do with the stuff they installed. There's something weird about the subdirectory names in one particular directory: they all end with character U+F028, which is in the […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

I've discovered the world of remote control construction vehicles. They cost thousands of pounds! Who's buying them?? https://heavydutyrc.com/collections/rc-wheel-loaders

I have had an idea for a very entertaining bug mathematically vacuous #BigMathsJam talk.

What is it with Node developers and making breaking changes monthly? I just want the script I wrote to run next time I come back to it 😭

I love getting email from people at Durham because their system puts names in all caps, so in my mind Durham is entirely staffed by clones of Terry Pratchett's Death.

No, *you* spent half an hour making a Geordie generator to demo a new @numbas feature

Have you ever been absolutely bodied by an abstract? Glad I'm not Garner! "Our main result is an infinite family of counterexamples to Garner’s conjecture" https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.09141

I saw a reference to Count Binface, which of course made me think about ways of subverting the electoral process. Of course these joke candidates (almost) always lose their deposits. But even in really high-profile by elections, there aren't that many joke candidates: in the Makerfield by […]

If you're teaching stats and want a perfect example of observation bias, here you go: https://cyclingindustry.news/cyclists-average-115-mins-a-ride-largely-on-sunday-especially-in-august/

RE: https://social.anoxinon.de/@ninawillburger/116713081046883553 I feel sad for this person who was born 1600 years before Winamp visualizers

Found this lovely butterfly or moth struggling on our patio. It looked like it was in the wars. Can anyone identify it?

Here's a data problem for someone handy with GIS: what's the largest circle you can draw, centred in the UK, where the majority of buildings are older than the USA?

Standard "oh yeah I should take a photo of the tyne bridges oh no it's almost too late" shot.

Yeah yeah static site generators working from plain text input are great, but there's a lot to be said for adding `contenteditable` to your page and writing the text WYSIWYG

these two acronyms have expanded in various ways over the years, to include related things: LGBT → LGBTQIA+ STEM → STEAMM Is there a conceivable situation where they would merge? What would that be?

On Thursday I will be in London and need dinner. Can anyone recommend anything good near King's Cross / Bloomsbury? Something filling, not too spendy or fancy, but proper quality. Burger, pizza, indian or mexican are my faves.

Still sorting through #beachspectres photos. I couldn't work out how to use Shotwell to pick out some photos and put them somewhere else, so I searched for other photo management apps. I've given Lap a go and I like it: https://github.com/julyx10/lap

I'm sorting through the #beachspectres photos. This one's a nice desktop background.

I love to read a paper with a "come get me" plea for collaborators at the end: (this is https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16402)

#cargobike goals 🚲

#beachspectres day 1 went really well. I heard that we might have completed 100 level-metatiles, which would be around 800-900 tiles stamped in the sand. The unusually gloomy weather didn't get us down. Same again tomorrow!

Packing for #beachspectres. Starting with the most important item.

I dreamt that somebody had invented a scheme where QR codes were encoded as hexadecimal strings, to save space? somehow??? Each 2×2 block in the QR code is converted to a hexadecimal digit, reading the bits left to right, top to bottom […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

@grodin I was just checking on openstreetmap where the water refill stations on Whitley Bay prom are, and I saw you tagged the one at the rendezvous. Thanks!

Just got absolutely soaked through while picking the 8-year-old up from school. As I stepped out the front door, I noticed the big grey cloud and went back in to get my coat. As she came out of school, it started to rain. Cycling back, her under the cargo bike roof, me the mouse-turned-coachman […]

Watching a video of a singer on youtube. The description calls her "umami for your ears". A commenter says she's "honey for my soul". Which body parts is she salty, sour, and bitter for?

Doing a stupid online work training. (important topic, stupid presentation) I've got all the accessibility options turned on. Which answers are green?

Tense times chez L-P #3dprinting

Jesus Christ - what the hell is going on with the Supreme Court in my country? First trans rights, now disability rights trashed. In some ways I'm even more concerned about this than the trans rights - as I'm pretty sure dodgy EHRC guidance won't survive a trip to Strasbourg (and the worry is […]

A mystery parcel is going to be delivered to me today. I got a note on Friday saying someone hadn't put enough postage on a parcel addressed to me. I've paid the fee, and they say it's going to be delivered today. Absolutely no idea what it is. I hope it's something nice and not, like, bees.

Challenge: read this paper without experiencing semantic satiation of the word 'fuzzy': https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0165011495003428

I could never bear to get rid of my lego train from 1992. I'm so pleased we could put it back together, and it still works! The 5-year-old has had a lovely time driving it back and forth.

This is very good on the logical preposterousness of the trans bathroom ban. It simply cannot have been the intention of the Equality Act or the governments which administered it. www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-t...

One week until #beachspectres! Exciting!! https://beachspectres.com/

This thing I've just done is so good I feel like knocking off early. I've written an extension for @numbas that adds a "constructive real number" data type, using the CReal.js library I ported from Java - https://github.com/christianp/creal.js. Numbas is written in such a way that I just […]

Note to self: you may not construct a string that is 2⁴⁸ characters long.

This sequence is not in the #oeis: 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 22, 28, 30 It's the record values of τ(𝑛+1) − τ(𝑛−1) .