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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

#statsjokepoll What's the difference between a well dressed man on a unicycle and a poorly dressed man on a bike? Attire! This is a new behavior. Huge spike at 4, low sd at 1.04. This seems to be an objectively above average joke.

histogram of ratings 1-5 with spike at 4: 5%, 14%, 23%,45%,13%

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I did the Monty Hall problem in class today and I named the goat behind the door Prepotente. No one got it. If kids aren't reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, what are they reading? NM, I know the answer.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Recurring theme in stats is that our probabilistic intuition sucks. I love the birthday problem - estimate the probability that 2 people in the room of about 55 have the same birthday. 83% guessed <50%, a majority <20%. Actual answer: 98%. (Match found on checking 5 students) #teachmath

Poll: how likely is it that 2 people in the room have the same bday? Almost certain 4%, Very likely 2%, Likely 10%, About even 0%, Unlikely 20%, Very unlikely 53% (!), Almost certainly not 10%.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I give my stats class a daily joke to rate from 1 to 5 and post the results #statsjokepoll. The idea is to generate data sets to analyze, and to break up the class a bit. But this has me thinking about the nature of humor, e.g. what kind of joke would give a uniform distribution? #mathchat

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros? Elephino! I got that one from the Muppets. Highest mean yet (3.73). #statsjokepoll

bar graph of joke results, left-skewed with high mean of 3.73

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Reposted by Bill Wood

HexSumGame.com @mathmisery.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

ok, got some coloring in and i think these are the best ones yet. different hyperbolic tilings seem to work better / worse with different color schemes. -- #mathart #mathsky #gamedev

math art on hyperbolic geometry of a solve HexSum board

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

What did the snail say while riding on the turtle's back? Whee! Suggested by @mathartforall.bsky.social. Maybe I told it wrong.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Interesting class discussion from a #statsjokepoll using the World's Funniest Joke. The poll matched the project's result with the highest mean so far but more from nobody hating it than everyone loving it. This is really the World's Least Unfunny Joke, which isn't the same thing. Joke in alt text

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says, "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence; then a gun shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, "OK, now what?

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I realized in last week's #statjokespoll that I can summon different kinds of distributions with different kinds of jokes. What kind of joke will get a uniform distribution?

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I asked my German friend if he knew how many innings were in a baseball game. He said, "No." The most successful #statsjokepoll yet, which is reassuring because I love this joke. Distribution was what I was rooting for -- generally liked, but some people just didn't get it.

Frequency chart of joke scores, spikes at 1,4,5.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

What has five toes and isn't my foot? Your foot. #statsjokepoll We calculated the mean and median in class. I don't think I'll tell my 12-year-old, who insisted I use this joke.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

#statsjokepoll from last week: What is orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot. It did alright.

bar chart of joke responses, symmetric with median at 3/5

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Today's #statsjokepoll: Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side! I thought this would be a good base line joke and I wanted a different data set so we could play with 5-number summaries. Always great when you tell a joke and no one is aware that a joke happened.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side! Bar chart showing students did not like this joke.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

First #statsjokepoll: How does NASA organize a party? They planet. Good start with what the class consensus agrees is a solidly mediocre joke.

Bar chart of joke results, rating 1 to 5, spike at 3

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I'm going to start every statistics class with a joke. I will then poll the class and have them rate the joke from 1 to 5. This will give us some data early to play with bar charts and such, but by the end of the term we'll have enough to do confidence intervals. I need jokes.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

And apologies in advance to my students this semester as my Rocketbook notes inevitably start looking like this.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Among my problems with AI is that I like the em dash.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

My 6th-grader got up this morning and asked me for some data so they could make box plots and histograms. Happily, I was ready to go because I've been doing exactly this all week preparing an online solution guide for my college statistics class. This is awesome in some ways, troubling in others.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Quick, cheap math! You can get the Squigonometry ebook today at half price! Just in time for easter, you can have your very own superegg hunt! link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

link.springer.com

Squigonometry: The Study of Imperfect Circles

This textbook offers an accessible, modern introduction to generalized trigonometric functions. Discover squigonometry: the study of imperfect circles.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Nice little calculus problem: You want to increase a number of the form x^y (x,y > 1) by adding a small amount to either the exponent or the base. Which is more efficient? 5^8, for example. #teachmath

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

“We must reject any negative solutions, of course, because there’s no such thing as negative time. Except in meetings.”

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

A student said she was having lasagna and another asked if it was homemade. Did you make the noodles? The sauce? If that's not homemade, how do we distinguish from prepackaged? Whence came a definition of home-assembled lasagna. This is a perfect example of how mathematical definitions happen.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Every year on this day I wonder why Sony doesn't release Groundhog Day 2. Same film, just add a 2 to the title card. Advertise it straight up with the original trailers without comment. They are just leaving money on the table.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Untangling Christmas lights reminds me why I didn’t stick with topology

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

I think this means that if I use my 20% off coupon for a $10 book then it will cost $50.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Ill-timed wind gust grabbed my final exams and distributed them all across my street. Just spent 45 minutes frantically hunting white papers on white snow. Only upside is these are finals and thus not returned, so I won't have to explain why they look like this.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

I am in this post and I am fine with it. Now leave me alone.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

"What do I need on the final to get a C-?" The brazen indifference to everything I'm trying to do with my class doesn't bother me so much as that they can't to the algebra necessary to answer this question.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

I just finished grading exams. My students will be very grateful for this.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

Assignment I might try next semester: have ChatGPT do one of my old exams and have the students grade it. #teachmath #mathsky

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

TIL the conversion ratio for miles to kilometers is very close to the golden ratio so you can estimate with the Fibonacci sequence: 5mi = 8km, 8mi=13km, etc

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Another failed math pangram, although I’ll concede this one for being proper.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

I am at an age where “I’m exhausted because I drank too much last night” means I drank a root beer after 7pm and had to get up three times to pee.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Spelling Bee just doesn’t like math.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Handy example I dumb-lucked into today as I had to conjure a vector angle problem on the fly: (1,2) and (3,1) make at a 45-degree angle.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

This week gave me an idea for a stats problem: determine whether “missing class for a funeral” and “there is an exam in class” are independent events. I have some data they can use.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

What’s is happening at this IHOP?

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Has anyone had any disgruntled students from their past stir up trouble lately? I got one from almost a decade ago and I wonder if it's because it's open season on professors right now and he was disappointed that I have no political posts on my socials to report. #teachmath

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

A pie chart illustrating the percentages of the types of pizza left over from dinner.

Pizza pie with 5 cheese slices and 3 with different toppings.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

My current favorite show just triggered my pet peeve: 3.141459... is not some secret code to the universe. If you must reference pi when you make alien contact, use the continued fraction expansion in case they don't have 10 fingers.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Our probabilistic intuition is worse than we realize. One nice thing about a large class (51 present) is I can prove this with the birthday problem. The true probability is over 97%. Usually my classes are right around the break-even point of 23. #teachmath

Bar chart of a survey an whether you think two people in the room of 51 have the same birthday. "Very Unlikely" (5-20%) is the overwhelming winner with 31%. The correct "Almost certain >95%" had the fewest votes with 4%.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

I need to anonymize student data for legal reasons using a 3rd party homework system (I'm going all-in on #MyOpenMath this year). Is there a smarter way to do this than emailing some randomly assigned user names (I'm thinking Transformers) to the students and keep my own look-up table? #TeachMath

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

RIP Tom Lehrer, the rare mathematician / musical humorist combo. I thought it was particularly cool that he released his catalog to the public domain a few years ago. g.co/kgs/QxuQAm9

g.co

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Broke my longest ever Wordle streak today. This was weirdly freeing.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Happy pi approximation day. I like to use 22/7 to introduce relative error, both because it’s a familiar example and it’s a nice surprise how good that simple estimate really is.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Happy tau day for those who celebrate.

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Bill Wood @billarama.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

I wanted to order the 63 but this waitress doesn’t need my crap today.

IHOP senior menu has item called 55+ 2x2x2 (2 eggs, 2 bacon, 2 sausage )

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