I’ve been methodically importing older posts from a previous incarnation of this site, and a couple of days ago something odd happened. I forgot to fix the year of the post, so it appeared as new. In itself, that is not odd, it happens too often. The oddness was that despite having being written in...

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After I wrote a bit about blog carnivals, my friend Chris Aldrich wondered whether I had any extant examples. I didn’t, because I hadn’t looked; I had been in pure reminiscence mode. Now I have done the work, yea unto the fifth page of search results, and I can reveal that there are indeed a few blog carnivals that seem to be alive and well

One that I hope will please Chris is the Playful Math Education Carnival (formerly “Math Teachers at Play”), which describes itself as “a monthly collection of mathy fun: tips, tidbits, games, activities, and more”. The latest edition, no. 148, is at Playful Math Education Carnival, where I learned about heptagonal numbers and centred heptagonal numbers. I also learned about another math carnival -- the aptly named Carnival of Mathematics -- with the latest edition at ThatsMaths. From that I grabbed the brilliant “can I remember the reciprocal” as a mnemonic for 1/π, which gives a much more accurate value for π than either “May I have a drink, alcoholic of course” or 22/7.¹

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It really is hard sometimes to understand the idiocy of artificial intelligence or machine learning or whatever the flavour of the day is today. This morning, I was slightly alarmed to see a warning from the Instagram gods, to whit:

It seems to think my post “looks like branded content” and sugg...

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Today is a bit of a geeky anniversary for me, which I would never had recognised had I not started trying to bring in old posts written on this day. Turns out that on 23 August 2004 I wrote my first piece using the WordPress CMS, while on 23 August 2006 I first published a piece of audio as a podc...

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In my as yet completely unsuccessful attempt to revive an internet meme, I was somewhat sketchy on the idea of planets, mostly because they were not something I ever used. I suggested that they were automatic accretions, without detailed curation. I was wrong, as Fluffy pointed out when a group of...

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