x = 16 sin³t y = 13 cos t – 5 cos 2t – 2 cos 3t – cos 4t

Right, that 100 books meme that’s been going around. First, it’s not really from the BBC. It’s from the Guardian. And it’s based on a poll from World Book Day 2007. Second, since it’s based on a poll, it reflects popular books, so I’m not sure why there seems to be a persistent myth that… Continue reading Bookish

No matter how much you badger me, I’m never going to sell back my used books. Never. I like books. That’s why I buy so many from you. And if you think I’m going to trade in a book I bought a scant 10 months ago (relatively newly-published, at that) for a third of its… Continue reading Dear Amazon…

I just installed the Now Reading Reloaded plugin and fiddled with my sidebar template, so you can see what I’m currrently reading. Over time, this will also log what I’ve read, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

I don’t understand the postal mail forwarding system. I sent out Xmas cards last month, and as usual, one of them came back. The sticker on it said that the forwarding time had expired, but had the correct forwarding address printed on it. If the USPS is going to go to the trouble of figuring… Continue reading Postal Oddities

It’s that time again… the King William’s College quiz is upon us. It rained pretty much all Xmas break, and when it didn’t rain we were cooped up in the house with “flu-like illnesses”. But I guess it was fairly restful, most of the time.

Q. Why can’t you tell a joke in octal? A. Because 7 10 11!

One of my colleagues came into my office the other day, and said to me: If p is prime and greater than 3, prove that p² – 1 is divisible by 24. Interested readers might want to try this for themselves: it’s not particularly difficult. Of course I started in right away. Immediately I thought:… Continue reading A maths diversion