iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 2h

"Sorry Ross" is tantalisingly close to being a palindrome

Reposted by Christian Lawson-Perfect

Chris Brooking @chris108.mastodonapp.uk.ap.brid.gy · 5h

Maths intuition fail. Taking clothes out of the tumble drier I lined up the odd socks on the edge of a table. Whenever I took one out that matched one on the table I rolled them together and added them to a pile of clothes to take upstairs and put away. When I took the last sock out of the drier […]

mastodonapp.uk

Original post on mastodonapp.uk

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

@chrisd I'm on a fixed rate of 12p/kWh, so the deal won't be as good a deal later tonight. But I don't have a big enough battery to make money time-shifting, so 🤷

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

yesss, one of the heaters has reached its target temp and turned off, and the battery is full, so it's now exporting to the grid and making me delicious pennies!

A chart showing the battery is full, 5.974 kW coming in from the solar panels, 3.144 kW going out to the grid, and 2.857 kW used by appliances.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

oh, this somehow became unmoored from the thing I was replying to??

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

The heaters are using about 5kW, and this random page tells me that my boiler produces about 30kW of heat, so it's not really doing the same job, but I might as well do it, eh?

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

The solar panels are making electricity faster than the house battery can take it in, so I've turned on the two big electric heaters I bought last month

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

It's a clever design idea, but Région Bourǵogne Frańche Comté??

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

@Floppy the arrow function version looks even more esoteric: (() => {...})();

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

huge props to the south africans a few years ago who tracked me down via ip address to accuse me of fraud when I 95% completed an order form just so I could see a total price.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

I don't like web forms that only show you a few questions at a time. It's not always a given that I will want to bother completing the whole form - a quick read of all the questions would help me decide that.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

Work email: "Join us on the 5th of November for the first NUWomen Menstrual Café! Refreshments. Single-use cups will be limited, so please bring your own reusable cup if you can!" That's the most unfortunate choice of words I've read all month.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

welp, it's some kind of race condition and that's as far as I got. It only happens in webR 0.6.0, not 0.5.9, but I don't have it in me to make a minimal example. In case @gws wants to think about it, here's the change I ended up making […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

Wow, I've managed to get an error message from #webR that has literally zero results on duckduckgo! It doesn't occur in the webR source either, so I think it might be from WASM. It's "bad generic call environment".

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

Does anyone know a clever way of finding the distance from an arbitrary point in the plane to the curve 𝑦 = 1/𝑥 ? I've reduced it to a quartic that I don't fancy solving.

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Reposted by Christian Lawson-Perfect

Chris Staecker @chrisstaecker.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'm refereeing a paper which uses ∓ by default rather than ±. Is this normal anywhere? (Middle-east?)

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

How has this only just been added to the #OEIS? oeis.org/A398406 "Hexadecimal expansion of the square root of 2."

oeis.org

A398406 - OEIS

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

the next three levels were really straightforward. Why did this one vex me so much?

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

Ubuntu 26.04 has a new default terminal app, which I've dutifully switched to using. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't come with a colourblind-accessible palette, so I've just lost half an hour to working out how to copy over my customised palette from the old app. Like, a significant […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

This Water Sort level drove me mad! I've been stuck on it since yesterday, and since my PC is spending hours doing a distro upgrade, I decided to try brute forcing it with a python script. The solution it found takes 65 moves 😭 "Relaxing colour-sorting […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Screenshot of Water Sort level 30, showing 14 containers, filled with different symbols. I can transcribe the symbols if you really want me to.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

and now it's completely stalled, but the ssh connection is still updating... ???

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

wowww, the server in South Africa that I admin for work is only getting 7KB/s from my server in the UK

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

e.g. "The only known values of n such that n!+1 is a perfect square are 4, 5 and 7. Paul Leyland, et al. have found no other solutions for n <= 1 million."

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

@robinhouston with a bit of codegolfing, I reckon you could find a seed that produces the program that finds seeds

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

If I was still doing integer sequence reviews, this one would get a very low score: Indices of record low-water marks of the sequence abs((sin(p))^p) where p is the numerator of the k-th convergent to Pi/2, starting from k = 1. oeis.org/A399429

oeis.org

A399429 - OEIS

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

I hate you, bit of wall next to the door that is narrower than my wallpaper scraper.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

@chris108.wsocial.eu I get €73.21/MWh for the British price, at £1 = €1.16. Had to look up what a therm is, though.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

with all these new clever terminal emulators that do things like show images, is there one that could use a different font, depending on which machine I've SSHed into?

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

Thomas the Tank Engine has had a less-problematic remake in recent years. Where's the decolonialised Babar remake?

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I've been slightly unfair: the statement is split into three sections: "We have charged you", with - signs in front of each number; "You have paid us", with + signs in front of each number, and "Credit on your account", with this weird +- situation. Without the "credit on your account" section […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

Might write to them to propose that they put 😭 in front of amounts that go to them, and 😀 in front of amounts that come to me.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

surely this is a problem accountants have solved: are there symbols for "going to me" and "going to you", distinct from + and -?

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I've just added up the whole statement and it looks like it's going to Octopus 😭

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

Interesting collection of symbols on my Octopus energy statement. Do you think that £41.39 is going to me, or to Octopus? The line below is definitely in my favour - it's the amount for electricity exported from my solar panels.

Credit on your account. Reversed account charge: +£-41.39. Electricity: +£208.63.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

@robinhouston super! Much easier to read. I assume you're busy printing the shapes from figure 4?

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

Aperiodic monotiles, in the Geobunnies style. Mathematics is hugely improved by the addition of a face, ears, and a little fluffy tail.

The Spectre and hat aperiodic monotiles, in bright colours, with a rabbit's face, ears and tail drawn on.

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

This is the bit of #Beamish museum that makes me the most nostalgic 😔

A plaque reading "scheme partly financed by the European regional development fund"

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

With LLMs, we've moved from bad students saying "the dog ate my homework" to now saying "the dog did my homework".

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Christian Lawson-Perfect @christianp.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

no such luck for null: 'anullb'.split(null) Array [ "a", "b" ]

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