Procaffinating: To delay or postpone action; put off doing something until you've had coffee.

Looking for some assistance with $\LaTeX$ ...

I'd like to insert an image floating left, an image floating right, some text, and have the images with some vertical placement overlap. The images are 0.3 of the page width, and the text would fit between, but pdflatex seems to insist on no vertical overlap.

Current text provided on request.

Help?

My latest bloggy thing. As always, comments, thoughts, reactions, /etc./ invited.

solipsys.co.uk/new/TheLinearFr

Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a mountaineer? A: Nothing - you can't cross a vector with a scalar.

Some passes of the visible from the UK overnight - I'll tweet/toot warnings closer to the time

maybe people who don't think privacy is important are okay with programming by only mutating global variables

I have *never* heard Czardas played like that. Truly, genuinely astonishing. I've heard many versions, with many good points, but this one had me sitting, spell-bound, open-mouthed.

Amazing.

On October 5th Jack Lousma will be in Pontefract. He was a member of the second manned crew on the Skylab Space Station in 1973, and Commander of STS-3, the third Space Shuttle mission in 1982.

Most famously, he was the CAPCOM recipient of that oft-quoted message.

You can buy tickets via EventBrite:

eventbrite.co.uk/e/jack-lousma

Tickets are also available directly from the event organisers:

space-lectures.com/events/2019

This promises to be fascinating, as have all the events by the organisers.

A heads up for people in the UK ...

There are three especially famous lines from the Apollo space program. "Houston, the Eagle has landed" is one, another is "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." But the third is:

Famously spoken by Jim Lovell when there was an explosion on Apollo 13, and quoted endlessly. In October, in the UK, you can have the chance to meet the man who took the call and replied.

I was obliged to be industrious; whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well. -- J.S.Bach

In about half an hour, UK pass, starting at 05:18:18, duration 102 secs, visible, Magnitude -1.9

Did you know that in random graphs with edge probability $1/n$ (just below the appearance of the giant component) there are lots of components of size $n^{2/3}$ that all look nearly the same as uniformly random spanning trees of a complete graph? And that the minimum spanning tree of a randomly-weighted complete graph, instead, looks like one of these components with a lot of others all glued onto it? Christina Goldschmidt describes her work in this area at maths.ox.ac.uk/node/30217

Some passes of the visible from the UK overnight - I'll tweet/toot warnings closer to the time

Medicine bottle: 'Keep away from children.' ... Excellent advice.

In about half an hour, UK pass, starting at 06:05:06, duration 151 secs, visible, Magnitude -1.6

In about half an hour, UK pass, starting at 04:31:30, duration 117 secs, bright, Magnitude -2.4

Some passes of the visible from the UK overnight - I'll tweet/toot warnings closer to the time

Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. -- Roosevelt's Law of Task Planning

In about half an hour, UK pass, starting at 05:17:50, duration 249 secs, bright, Magnitude -2.8

Some passes of the visible from the UK overnight - I'll tweet/toot warnings closer to the time

A Mastodon instance for maths people. The kind of people who make $\pi z^2 \times a$ jokes.
Use $ and $ for inline LaTeX, and $ and $ for display mode.