Today I did some high intensity interval training for the first time since 22 July. First there was some very minor surgery, then a wonderful couple of weeks in the countryside where I swam every day instead. So, after a gap of 46 days, it was time to get going again.

And it was tough.

I got thr...

Just spent a fine few hours going through two large boxes of photographs. Some have not seen the light of day for four house moves and at least 12 years.

“But what if I want/need one of them?”

“You don't even know what there is, how could you possibly want/need anything specific.”

In best d...

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...

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

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...