We heard you like bikes so we put a bike on your bike
#carryshitolympics #brompton
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Mair A-W
@mair@mathstodon.xyz
mastodon 4.7.2Everybody loves the Topology Trousers https://mair.allen-williams.com/notes/trousers.html
47 Followers
187 Following
31 Posts
Joined February 15, 2024
The best way to math!
(from: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-powerful-new-qr-code-untangles-maths-knottiest-knots-20260422/)
Replying to
@TeaKayB my masto timeline seems excited about this thing lately https://mastodon.me.uk/@semachthemonkey/116370548501602833
I know nothing more about it except i saw a few posts go by...
Yesterday's pastpuzzle was (I thought*) completely solvable from just two rows of one person's results under the hashtag here.
Today's was trickier -- almost no yellow squares (which in hindsight was a hint in itself). After browsing the hashtag for a while I had a handful of possibilities for the last pair of digits, and a handful of possibilities for the century -- but a handful times a handful is too much to carry -- and a bunch of notes like "d2 is not 2+d4", "d3 is not d4-1", which I couldn't quite organise in my head.
So I got around to coding up a little thing, where I enter results rows from other people's results, and it tells me which dates are compatible. (*It turned out there were actually two possible options for yesterday's, based on the two rows I used, almost a century apart, I had mistakenly rejected one of them). I fed it quite a lot of results before it pinned down today's.
Next I'm curious to try and pull out some more details about how much different results rows narrow down the solution, and how they interact most efficiently...
#pastpuzzle 469
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Five years since I had done any of this rag rug. Took me a little while to remember how I was even doing it. One episode of @Eigenraum@podcasts.social podcast and I now know it's possible* to play tunes with the electric toothbrush, why the Pythagorean comma is called that, what oeis sequence number 1 is, and I'm two more rows through the rug. Maybe I'll finish it *this* decade.
*ish.
RE: @IngaLovinde@embracing.space
evidently need to listen to @Eigenraum@podcasts.social #45 https://eigenpod.de/eig045-umzugshilfe-mit-claudia/
Bank holiday weekend! Time to learn Galois theory!
Step 1: fetch your yak...
RE: @cathy@mamot.fr
... @TeaKayB@mathstodon.xyz relevant
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Got the #balkonsolar up!
Just another Sunday night in the shire
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@Wouter_Pieterse it maybe happened that my results the first time I tried it were an unusual case. I was about to show it to my friend and I realised that they could give him quite a big clue to the solution, and then I got curious about how much of a giveaway they were
#pastpuzzle en-466
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... of course my current "meta game" of solving it as a logic puzzle from other people's shared results relies on everybody _else_ solving the puzzle normally first ;-)
Nicely done, masto
Replying to
@TeaKayB downthread from the post i linked is a link to this blog https://concretedog.blogspot.com/2026/04/xteink-x4-with-open-source-firmware.html which might give you more of an idea whether it matches what you are looking for. and I guess it has a hashtag
Replying to
@mjd@mathstodon.xyz @regordane@mastodon.me.uk if you go to the 'Schedule' (https://www.icm2026.org/event/ac193975-5d24-4628-8c30-ddb23de19a8b/catalog ) and click on 'filters' -> category, you can tick 'public lecture' (doesn't seem possible to link to the filtered search directly). There seems to be one a day, in the afternoon. But maybe the organisers will have better information
@aaronc81@ruby.social an issue with today's Loconundrum? Wouldn't let me choose my starting station, but after I solved it from a different start station, the route from my new start station goes VIA the one I originally tried... so there fairly obviously is a route to it from my first guess attempt, which leaves the second option in the screenshot: something's gone wrong on your end?
Replying to
@TeaKayB I'd be interested, it's not like my to-read pile is... wait. 🤔 But I'd still be interested, and also in which have multiple recs... if it's easy for you to do
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@TeaKayB it looks like you have replies to this ask running on masto, bluesky, and your bridgy masto account? will you collate them later? you know, if other people are interested in a list of great public domain literature?
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Weekend to-do list:
- (Learn to) rebuild bike wheel
- Port UbuntuTouch
- (Learn to) repad old flute
- Hoover
- Dismantle old phone
- Learn Galois Theory
- Install solar panels
Probably I'll just sit in the garden.
Replying to
@ShaulaEvans Hi! I translate from German and Dutch into (British) English.
My background is in computer science and maths and I would *love* to do more maths translations (or proofreading), and more work in LaTeX (a system commonly used for writing maths), but I don't get asked to do that much.
Meantime, I've built up quite a good expertise in construction/civil engineering, and railway/railway vehicles, as well as more general "technical" topics.
My website is mair.allen-williams.com
I certainly *have* thoughts on translation and language from time to time, but I'm not sure I've posted many of them on my masto...
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Replying to
"the violins were out of tune and the conductor was out of time", said Tom, disconcertingly.
After noticing that the "share result" copy/paste from #pastpuzzle includes information about how far off each guess was, trying a meta-puzzle of deducing the solution based on other people's result shares, without looking at the question.
Yesterday's made a sort of "meta meta" puzzle with a lot of people getting it in one or two guesses -- a date people remembered, i.e. in their lifetimes.
Today's was more puzzly, but I managed to pick it off after a bit of scribbling on scrap paper. A lot of result sets seem to follow the same sequence, so they don't add any new information.
I'm not sure whether I'm making full use of the information that's there; I'm curious about trying to code something up...
#pastpuzzle en-288
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Not finished back issues of Eigenraum and π=3 podcast yet, but this month I am looking for maths podcasts in French.
Je cherche des podcasts sur les mathématiques en français. Qui a quelque chose pour moi?
Collection so far / trouvés jusqu'ici:
https://www.radiofrance.fr/francemusique/podcasts/musique-maths?p=2
https://www.radiofrance.fr/savoirs-plus/podcasts/l-oreille-mathematique
Et cette liste: https://www.monclasseurdemaths.fr/espace-enseignants-lyc%C3%A9e/des-podcasts-sur-les-maths/
Bank Holiday Galois Theory progress:
Thursday: watched 1 min of the intro, lecturer recommended the use of sagemath, which is no longer in Debian. Installed conda, installed sage, uninstalled sage, reconfigured conda, installed sage, watched the other 7 minutes of the intro pt1, laptop ran out of battery.
Friday: watched 2 min of intro pt2 then got stuck on the lecturer's expression for '2' (screenshot).
Today I will finish the intro chapter 💪 !
Replying to
@denisbloodnok in this case the Lorge bike was being collected because it needed repair...