Colin Beveridge

Discussing topology with 11yo (that t-shirt has a hole in / five actually / four ACTUALLY) ending with the conclusion that a balloon has -1 holes. 11yo asks if there's such a thing as half a hole?

What is the world coming to? Battered Graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallow? O tempura, o s'mores!

I've told young Fred he's absolutely to young to read HHGG, so I'm confident he'll be carrying a towel everywhere within a few weeks.

Did Samuel Beckett Drive a Young André the Giant to School? A legend about the iconic wrestler has a significant grain of truth to it but has been embellished over the years.

Whether it's *completely* true or not (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/andre-the-giant-samuel-beckett/) I love the idea of Andre the Giant hopping into Samuel Beckett's car for a lift to school and a chat about the cricket.

Ah, Lawyers Guns And Money. Sorted.

Oo, I can probably summon up muscle memory for Murderers On Mendenhall.

I can do War In Your Heart. Do You Do Any Dylan, maybe?

Hive mind! I might need to do an emergency second open mic set and I've used all the songs I rehearsed. What should I play now?

@aleen There's a special word in German for people who joined the Nazi party for pragmatic reasons, such as looking after their workforce. They're known as "Nazis".

A conference banner with a logo that looks like the equation "E - A×M + S = 2018", above a whiteboard with some maths which is in the text of the post.

On our gather.town coffee call with @gavan and @mattp this morning, we noticed that the banner behind me could be completely solved, using a couple of well-known formulae and a reasonable boundary condition.

Oh! I had no idea Allan Ahlberg had still been alive -- the Ahlbergs are authors who seem to exist parallel to time. Their books were an absolute mainstay of the kids' bedtimes when they were younger; I'd change the words to Each Peach Pear Plum, but young Bill wouldn't let me get away with that […]

Say the Prime

Current progress: 0.327%. Come on, humans!

https://saytheprime.com/

As manager, I win dramatically (6, 7)

Today I'm on my way to Liverpool for the very first time, for this LMS workshop: https://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~itho17/workshop2025/
If you're going to be there, please say hello!

And if you're not going to be there but know about anything in Liverpool I might like to see (not Beatles-related, not […]

10yo couldn't bring Ozzy Osbourne's name to mind and called him Bobby Bobkinson.

"By 1981 he had fallen so far off the cultural radar that, he told The Harvard Crimson, some people thought he was dead. (“I was hoping the rumors would cut down on the junk mail,” he said.)"

Tom Lehrer passed away (for real) this week […]

While I do appreciate the option to remove all AI features from a text editor, it does feel a bit like the option to remove all turds from a swimming pool.

“What if it’s a hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

15+ years old, but still VERY relevent — and if we had acted 15 years ago, the “better world” we’d be creating would be a LOT better & easier to reach. There are real consequences we’re just starting to see to not heeding this cartoon a lot sooner.

Even worse if we don’t heed it now. #ClimateCrisis

[Incorrect maths that I'm perfectly aware is incorrect, thanks!]

At Weymouth @MathsJam. we noted that \\( \ln(2) \approx \frac{23 C 2}{365} \\). Hence, if 23 people shake hands a pair at a time, and each pair has a \\( 1 - \frac{1}{365} \\) chance of not sharing a birthday, the probability of […]

I've been making noughts and crosses strategy videos on the back of a rickshaw in preparation for launching a tuktuk tictactoe tactic tiktok.

@robinhouston You can't nerdsnipe me today, Houston! ;-)

@robinhouston Sadly, an abundance of commitments and a shortage of attention are holding me up! Hopefully I can have a solid run at it in the morning.

I'm a bit less certain of the detail now, but the general idea holds, I think.

Here's an updated geogebra: https://www.geogebra.org/classic/wpyq2xyj

Here's my understanding of what's going on in Oskar's video: https://makertube.net/w/2Pf8EsaAatrKYTct4H2XvB -- if I've messed up anything obvious, please let me know!

cc @robinhouston @ColinTheMathmo @henryseg

Also, I feel like there should be a magical calculating device called an abacadabacus.

Well, *I've* been thoroughly nerdsniped by @robinhouston and Oskar van Deventer, but I think I might be able to explain what's going on.

@robinho uston "I asked the help of some mathematicians specialised in geometry. That didn't help either." Excellent line.

There’s a nice mathematical question here from Oskar van Deventer: what is the correct shape for the spiral grooves in this puzzle he designed?

(He was forced to use an approximation in the puzzle as made.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHqqXBqckjs

I find it very hard to visualise the […]

An incomplete list of people excluded from 'international' conferences that are in-person only and aren't streamed or recorded
- People with caring responsibilities
- People with disabilities
- People with health vulnerabilities
- People who don't fly in recognition of climate emergencies
- […]

@Rowena Could you tell me a bit more? Traffic jams of many types are definitely on the list, and I'm curious what you mean by an unstable queue.