There haven't been any updates on the Forties play for far too long. I have been working on it, but various computer problems have prevented me uploading any more recent drafts. Anyway, here's what I've got so far. It's about twice as long as the last posted draft, has more characters, and incorporates some of your excellent suggestions.

Script ( Read more... )

I find myself doing increasing amounts of sewing these days. This is partly because all of my clothes are starting to fall apart and I hate clothes-shopping: I can only do it if I kid myself that I'm buying a souvenir (which explains all of the T-shirts) or hiking gear or something. Actually, I've noticed a lot of people wearing patched, tattered ( Read more... )

My paper has finally been uploaded to the arXiv. Gaze in awe upon its higher-dimensional beauty at http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0607423. And if you should chance to meet the authors of the diagram package XY-pic, please give them a good kicking from me. Does anyone know of a less painful ( Read more... )

I'm going away (first to London, then to Nova Scotia) tomorrow, so I'll have to stop work on the fridge poetry for a while. So, here's what I've done so far (100K tarball), in case any of you want to have a crack while I'm away. There are lots of dead-ends and abandoned files there, but you should be able to work it out from the README and the ( Read more... )

OK, I've looked at some "official" fridge poetry, and it's printed in 20pt Times New Roman on segments that are a fraction less than 1cm high. The baseline is not a fixed distance from the bottom: rather, the word is centred in the tile ( Read more... )

I keep getting assaulted by daft ideas for things to make - you may remember the achiral fan 1, the board games, the telescopic juggling clubs, the reimplementation of TeX in Caml... Sometimes, I get as far as starting to make them before abandoning them uncompleted, but I'd love to finish one one of these days. I blame dynix 2Anyway, the last couple I've ( Read more... )

Elizabeth came up from Oxford on Sunday to give the Geometry seminar on Monday afternoon. She was speaking about her DPhil work, which is fairly hard-core algebraic geometry (specifically, she's using geometric invariant theory to construct coarse moduli spaces for stable maps). None of us were very familiar with the background material, and so she ( Read more... )

It's a little-appreciated fact that fans are chiral (ie, they come in left-handed and right-handed versions). Don't believe me? Lend your favourite fan to a friend, and watch them try to open it the wrong way, messing up the spokes. This has two downsides: first, the fact that your friends will infallibly open your fans the wrong way and damage ( Read more... )

As part of my ceaseless quest to become one of those crazy internet dudes that builds cool stuff, I hereby announce my intention to build the following things:

• A theremin. dynix had a mate who built one of these, and it doesn't sound too hard apart from the signal generators. Or I could just nick one of the many circuit diagrams available on the magic ( Read more... )