Happy Christmas and happy Hanukkah (they coincide this year)! This is not especially festive except that I was reminded of it at Midnight Mass while counting verses of a rather long litany.

When I was a teenager, I invented what as far as I know is an original method of finger-counting; at least I was unaware of having based it on anything else ( Read more... )

On our date a couple of weeks ago, I found myself explaining to ghoti the basics of why P vs. NP is an interesting question. (Clearly, we have the best romantic conversations.) I'd like to explain this at a bit more length and to more people. You'll have to care at least a little bit about maths to find this interesting, but I hope I've managed to ( Read more... )

Dear Lazyweb:

ghoti and I were trying to explain a strange shape to xanna and Jacob in the hope that they knew the proper geometric name for it. This is the shape of the containers that the ice lollies we like come in (old but still accurate picture, search for "Jubbly"). It's the original tetrahedron shape used by Tetra Pak, now called the Tetra Classic ( ( Read more... )