Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp@mathstodon.xyz

Microsoft Word: now that ordinal is a superscript! You're welcome!

Also Word: now everything is superscript! You're completely welcome!

This is either an argument for or against letting the mathematician prepare the picnic

Spot the deliberate mistake

"pen on a bit of string" is considerably less shoddy on a larger scale, when it's "bit of chalk and some string held down by my big toe"

BTW, the least-shoddy, least-awful device for drawing circles and lines I've ever had is the thaMographe. It's a ruler! It's a protractor! It's a (discretised) set of compasses!
I bought it on a whim after seeing it online and thinking "that's weird!", but now I've used it I think every school kid should have one

My question today: what's the shoddiest non-awful device for drawing circles I can come up with?
Already ruled out as compeltely useless: entirely freehand; bit of string tied to a pen

@ColinTheMathmo We just drove past the Kelpies. It's not the day for a visit!

Where's door number 1? How do you know?

There's no angle from which a dodecahedron looks like a regular solid.

I had an idea about how to make a binary clock entirely in CSS, with no JavaScript.
A nice bit of mental exercise for the train to work!
https://css-binary-clock.glitch.me/

The official mastodon android app seems to have updated, and the new colour for links is really hard for my colourblind eyes to read when using dark mode.
I've made an issue on the github repo: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/issues/217

Using https://what-colour-is-that.glitch.me/ to decode a paper which assumes much more colour vision than I have.
Even though I made the app, I still don't believe those colours are different!

The last wrinkle for standard arithmetic is that exponentiation is right-associative: while for the other operations you work left-to-right:
1 − 2 − 3 = (1 − 2) − 3,
the order goes the other way for exponentiation:
1 ^ 2 ^ 3 = 1 ^ (2 ^ 3)

Here are some animations to illustrate. In the first, the operations happen left-to-right, so they appear in the same order in the output as in the input.
In the second, the addition must happen after the multiplication, so it's held back.
In the third, brackets ensure that the addition happens first.

I've spent an entire day making this illustration for an @aperiodical post. I'm glad I stuck with it, because for ages it was absolute bums and then suddenly it all came together!

Hardest game of Guess Who ever.
"Are they male?"
(no flaps down)
"Are they white?"
(no flaps down)
"Are they under 40?"
(no flaps down)
"Are they wearing a shirt with a collar?"
AHA!

I've just discovered something really handy!
In Jupyter Lab, if you make a markdown cell starting with a header, an arrow toggle appears which can hide all the cells underneath, up to the next header!

Back in the office for only the second time since lockdown. My desk calendar is frozen in time, a little inadvertent monument to covid.

New meme format.
https://somethingorotherwhatever.com/didnt-graduate-texts-generator/