Add a frisson of peril to statements of fact with the word 'currently'!

My house is currently two miles inland.
Money can currently be exchanged for goods and services.
The official language of France is currently French.

If you're requiring a space, you might as well require a * symbol. Students type 'xy' because that's what they write on paper.

I have a user interface problem that I hope isn't only solved by adding yet another option for authors to understand.

Student types a mathematical expression. We allow implicit multiplication, so xy is interpreted as x*y.
What to do about pi? Is it p*i or π?

I guess most of the time, you'd expect it to be interpreted as π. But you might be doing something with complex numbers, and p*i is really what you meant.
I suppose rendering π would at least give you a hint to add the * symbol

A helpful message added by IT to the bottom of an email thread in my inbox: "Warning: this message came outside from the university".

One problem: my university, or theirs?

Without turning to the computer to brute force it, can you figure out which remainder class (mod 7) occurs most frequently among the numbers formed as permutations of 123456789?

I have been told about another mystical property of 17:

If a finite simple group's order is $$6p$$ with $$p$$ prime, then $$p \leq 17$$, and there are examples for all primes less than 17.

I wonder if this falls easily out of simple Sylow considerations.

Chillies! Grown outside! In the North of England!

Turned out she didn't have any on.
Vacuous truth: the last refuge of the scoundrel.

I think Google should save everyone a lot of time and effort and jump straight to discontinuing new services:

"We are proud to announce that Google Kitchen Tools will no longer be available on Sep 1st 2020, nor has it ever been available. Should you wish to export your Google Kitchen Tools data, you should be aware that there is no data, as Google Kitchen Tools has never existed.

Thanks,

@christianp "Almost the worst approximation among all the very best possible approximations to Φ day"

It's 5/8, or Almost The Worst Approximation to Φ day!

@jsiehler if you're referring to $$e=3-\cfrac{1}{4-\cfrac{2}{5-\cfrac{3}{6-\cfrac{4}{7-\cdots}}}}$$, I do wonder how something like this was not noticed before...

Interesting paper on computer-generated conjectures regarding continued fraction representations of mathematical constants.
arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00205.pdf

In particular, Figure 2 shows a really splendid (conjectural) representation of $$e$$. I gave up trying to figure out how to type it readably here.

Going to start my Mastodon account with a result I put quite a bit of work into: Sorting 11 inputs using a sorting network requires 35 comparisons and sorting 12 inputs requires 39 comparisons. I still haven't finished writing the paper (and should be working on that instead), but all the code including a formal proof in Isabelle/HOL is on github: github.com/jix/sortnetopt

I'd like to know if this is worth having, and if it is, how it could be improved.
I'm particularly interested in accessibility: is it usable with a screenreader?

I'm sure this must already be a thing, but I can't come up with the right google words to find it, so I've made my own:
A tool to take a subtitles file and a video and make a page showing the transcript alongside the video itself.
github.com/christianp/transcri

At the moment it just copes with Vimeo, because that's where the two videos I want it for are hosted.
Here's one of them: numbas.org.uk/talks/numbas-tra

I have a load of EAMS talks on YouTube, so I'll support that next

Just realised my GCSEs are old enough to do their A Levels

An estimation problem: how many toots do you see each day?
I'm tempted to say "wrong answers only", but I'd actually like to know the right answer. So, do either, and it'll be fun to guess which is which

Oh, it's π approximation day, 22/7. I nearly didn't notice!

I've seen some combinatorial underestimates on packaging before, but this one looks particularly low.