An anthropologist friend once remarked to me that university meets precisely the anthropological definition of a coming-of-age ritual.

• There is some form of ceremony to mark the start of the ritual.
• For the duration of the ritual, the initiates are separated from the mass of the people, and allowed an unusual degree of license to do foolish and/or ( Read more... )

• Mathematics is the study of statements which can be proved.
• Science is the study of statements which can't be proved, but can be falsified.
• The humanities are the study of statements which can neither be proved nor falsified, but whose credibility can be supported or undermined by advancing evidence.
• Philosophy is the study of statements which can ( Read more... )

Whenever I teach somebody to contact juggle (if you don't know what I'm talking about, this video's quite good), I always start by asking the same question:

"Do you know how to ski?"

Skiing and contact juggling, you see, work in ( very much the same way. )

A simple and occasionally handy trick which deserves to be better known.

Use your thumb as a pointer, and your finger joints and fingertips to represent the numbers. Thus:

• Thumb pointing to base of index finger = 0
• Thumb pointing to first joint of index finger = 1
• Thumb pointing to second joint of index finger = 2
• Thumb pointing to tip of index finger ( Read more... )

Suppose we have an algorithm whose performance (in some axis) is worse than linear - quadratic, say. The example that I'm thinking of is concatenation of lots of strings using the Schlemiel the Painter algorithm. Suppose we want to perform this calculation on a lot of data. The best thing to do, of course, is to find a better algorithm or some way ( Read more... )

You can't spell "patriot" without "riot".

You can't spell "team" without "tea", either...

Perhaps you've had this experience ( Read more... )

Another sketch idea.

CIVILIAN is attempting to do something perfectly normal and unobjectionable: drink a cup of tea, or put a stamp on a letter, or tie his shoelaces. Enter JOBSWORTH.JW: Oi! You can't do that here ( Read more... )

Thought for a sketch, to be performed near the end of a show ( Read more... )

Here's something that occurred to me the other day: consider ( duck-typed languages like Python )