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# Christian Lawson-Perfect@christianp@mathstodon.xyz

The Bulgarian solitaire and the mathematics around it
Article by Vesselin Drensky
In collections: Easily explained, Games to play with friends, History, Puzzles
The Bulgarian solitaire is a mathematical card game played by one person. A pack of $n$ cards is divided into several decks (or "piles"). Each move...
URL: arxiv.org/abs/1503.00885v1
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/1503.00885v1

Happy Birthday to M.C. Escher!

The paramagnetic and glass transitions in sudoku
Article by Williams, Alex and Ackland, Graeme . J.
In collection: Basically physics
We study the statistical mechanics of a model glassy system based on a familiar and popular mathematical puzzle. Sudoku puzzles provide a very rare example of a class of frustrated systems with a unique groundstate without...
URL: arxiv.org/abs/1212.1649
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/1212.1649v1

@PgSuper I think Ramanujan alluded to such experiences.

I wonder if some crazy mathematician ever thought of talking to a number as if it was a friend... (Because numbers are friends?)

oh, you like Mikhail Gromov? name five of his papers

@espectalll that might just be a coincidence: the ÷ symbol was used to represent subtraction in many places

Genuinely assumed this was about Prince William and really couldn't work out what the banks could possibly be doing.

@ColinTheMathmo as far as I know, none. I was hoping to get a dev instance set up at home today so I could play with adding an intermediate step so moderators have to approve signups, but got fed up with config nonsense

Another attempt at setting up a mastodon development environment, another dismal failure.
This time: rails db:setup fails with "must be owner of relation account_domain_blocks". mastodon is the owner of that table. 🤷‍♂️ Postgres gives such terrible error messages!

I've turned account registration on mathstodon.xyz back on. I'm going to spend some time today thinking about how to deter spammers.

#programming idea:

there is nothing more irritating then eg. finding a cool rust crate and not being able to run the examples

...ok, maybe mosquitoes are worse

but other than that!!!! nothing!!!! **literally** nothing!!

Made some visuals like those from the latest Numberphile!

We're looking students to work on compiler / virtual machine things:

unb.ca/research/casatlantic/pr

also a "Research Assistant/Software developer" for the same projects.

@andrewt I assume you've already ruled vim out of one of those bullet points (or "good")

Mrs L-P had a very happy accident at the photo printers

Found a roll of receipt paper while cleaning and could finally run a ~real~ ed(1) session // @_xhr_

@andrewt @ada @webinista as a colourblind person, HSL is basically the only way I can think about colours and get reasonable results. If I *know* that two colours have the same L value, it doesn't matter what my lyin' eyes say.
I do a similar thing on read.somethingorotherwhatever.