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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As I continue reading previous blog posts written on this day, I’ve been struck by a couple of things. One is how often there didn’t seem to be anything worthwhile writing about, and how even writing about that seemed worthwhile. There was a phase when lots of bloggers were looking at their logs and writing about the strange searches that brought readers to them, probably only to be disappointed. Linked to that, there were blog carnivals and blog memes.¹

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I bagged my first geohash. It was fun, in a boring kind of way.

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President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when...

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