A few months ago I noticed the banner image of Mastodon user @emacsomancer@types.pl: I had two questions about this. First where is it from and is there more? @emacsomancer pointed me to the source Github repository and also to this magnificent hand-lettered interpretation of it by artist Michał "phoe" Herda, who is also an author of books...
Last week I received a widely circulated email that began: With tall apartment buildings being erected all around, we feel it is ever more important to preserve our community. I sent this reply. I have been a Spruce Hill homeowner for 16 years. I had to miss the June 26 meeting because I was out of the country. But I think the historic...
Looking at license plates the other day I noticed that if you have a four-digit number with digits , and , then will always be a multiple of . For example, and . Mathematically this is uninteresting. The proof is completely trivial. (Such a number is simply , and .) But I thought that if someone had pointed this out to me when I was eight...
Toph and I were discussing the story of Loki and Skaði, one of my favorites. (Previously.) The Æsir have killed Skaði's father, and owe her compensation. She has been sad since her father died, she says, and demands that the Æsir make her laugh. Loki rubs his hands together and says "Leave this to me!". He takes a rope, ties one end to a...
Like almost everyone except Alexander Grothendieck, I understand things better with examples. For instance, how do you explain that $$(f\circ g)^{-1} = g^{-1} \circ f^{-1}?$$ Oh, that's easy. Let be putting on your shoes and be taking off your shoes. And let be putting on your socks and be taking off your socks. Now is putting on your...
When I was a kid, the Beatles’ seminal 1966 album Revolver was 20% shorter. The original release was not a long album: 14 tracks, totaling 34:45. But the version I grew up with had 11 tracks, totaling only 27:31. Three tracks, all by Lennon, were omitted by Capitol from the North American release because they had previously been released on...
[ Thanks to John Wiersba for noticing that I forgot to publish this. ] A few weeks ago I wrote a letter to my neighbors about why I thought it was a bad idea to oppose building more housing in our neighborhood. I didn't write this paragraph: In the past it has often happened that a group of wealthy landowners conspired to hold onto what they...
Benjamin Franklin wrote and published Poor Richard's Almanack annually from 1732 to 1758. Paper was expensive and printing difficult and time-consuming. The type would be inked, the sheet of paper laid on the press, the apprentices would press the sheet, by turning a big screw. Then the sheet was removed and hung up to dry. Then you can do...
If you're an annoying know-it-all like me, I suggest that you try playing the following game when you attend a conference or a user group meetup or even a work meeting. The game is: If someone asks you a question, and you say “I don't know”, you score a point. That's it. That's the game. “I don't know” doesn't have to be perfectly...
(Source: XKCD “Exam numbers”.) This post is about the bottom center panel, “Game Theory final exam”. I don't know much about game theory and I haven't seen any other discussion of this question. But I have a strategy I think is plausible and I'm somewhat pleased with. (I assume that answers to the exam question must be real numbers — not — and...
Marnanel Thurman reported the following item that they found in an 1875 book titled How to Entertain a Social Party: To Make a Loaf of Bread Dance on the Table. — Having a quill filled with quicksilver and stopped close, you secretly thrust it into a hot roll or loaf, which will put it in motion. (Bottom of page 46.) No further...
[ Previously: [1] [2] [3] ] A couple of years back I wrote: I live in southeastern Pennsylvania, so the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Delaware triple point must be somewhere nearby. I sat up and got my phone so I could look at the map, and felt foolish. As you can see, the triple point is in the middle of the Delaware River, as of course it must be;...