OK, kids, gather round old Gramps as he shows off the first calculator he ever owned. He got it as a present for passing his O-levels. (Actually, even if I’d had the calculator prior to taking my O-levels, I wouldn’t have been allowed to use it for the exams. Unlike math tests today, It was slide rules only in those days.) Are you gathered round? Here it is, the Litton Royal Digital 5-T from 1973. […]
READ MOREOK, this one is going to be short, because quite honestly I cannot follow the proof in detail at all. Either I don’t have the required continued fraction mathematics, or I can’t follow advanced calculus proofs any more. Probably option C: all of the above. For a quick refresh of what continued fractions are, see here and here. […]
READ MOREWe’ve just returned from our annual outing to Orlando so that my wife could run the Walt Disney World Marathon. (Before you ask: 4:04:16, which is her best time for a while.) When you arrive at the airport, you have to take the train from the gates to the terminal. It’s always made me laugh when the recorded announcement, in a very Walt Disney World voice, says “This train will be departing momentarily” and I feel like quipping “when’s it going to continue?” It’s the way I tell ’em. […]
READ MOREEvery now and then, I get one of those – ahem – marketing emails offering me a place in some seminar that promises to teach me good business writing. I love reading them to try and find not so obvious grammar errors (Grammar Nazi, moi?) and thereby vindicate my belief that such workshops are pretty worthless. Invariably, one of the bullet points of things you’d learn by attending the session is how to write numbers in text. “Learn one simple rule,” the email goes, “and never get it wrong again.” Or something along those lines. […]
READ MOREI learned today that Ronald Searle died at his home in France on 30 December, at the end of last year. He was 91. He was, without a doubt, one of the best cartoonists of the last sixty to seventy years, with a certain inimitable scruffy style. Certainly one of my favorites. […]
READ MOREThe ancient Greeks (and pretty much everyone in the art world from the Renaissance onwards) were kind of fascinated with the golden ratio, or φ (phi). To see why it might be seen as interesting, let’s take a look at a geometric view of the golden ratio. Consider a rectangle: the sides of this rectangle are in the golden ratio if you can subtract a square based on the shorter side and are left with another smaller rectangle which is also in the golden ratio. Inception! […]
READ MORENo, this blog post is not about that. This blog post is about the removal of frustrations, of deep embedded wrongs, and about aiming for something better and further out than the middle of next week. It’s also about this happening in 2012. […]
READ MOREA couple of months ago I purchased The Body Farm on DVD from Amazon.co.uk. In theory it sounded promising enough: a series spinoff of Waking the Dead, with one of the characters from that series moving on from the break-up of Boyd’s cold case crime unit. It stars Tara Fitzgerald as Dr Eve Lockhart. […]
READ MOREAs it says in my bio for this site, I’m a calculator collector. Mostly Hewlett-Packard LCD calculators it must be said, but every now and then I pick up something from another manufacturer. […]
READ MOREBack in my days at Kings College, there was a movement to try and make sure that we mathematics students could write. There was a general worry that because we expressed ourselves tersely and symbolically in the language of mathematics we would forget how to express ourselves correctly in the language of English. So, while I was there, we had to write two essays, one at the end of our first year and one at the end of the second. The essays should be on a mathematical subject, maybe even with a proof or two, but it had to be preponderantly a narrative. (If you think about it, this is the same worry that developers might not be able to express themselves clearly and concisely to their users, which is why there’s so much emphasis on “written and verbal communication” in job descriptions.) […]
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