little bits of everything

 I've been tagged by Keith (aka adactio) , not personally, but figuratively. Only by answering these questions can I close the browser tab with his post on it. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Because I enjoyed reading other blogs and I wanted to join in. I love the idea of publishing to the world. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before? I use Google's Blogger. It's a bit of a backwater, and doesn't get much love from their developers, inasmuch as they're not developing the platform. But it's free though, and I can use my own domain name. Before that I used Dave Winer's editthispage.com. More on my 20 years of blogging post , which I wrote 6 years ago. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? The latter. When do you feel most inspired to write? If you look at the list of articles you'll s...

I've come across a couple of things recently that have blown my mathematical mind. The first is the Infinitely Large Napkin , a 1000+ page PDF of all sorts of maths. It's just at the level I'm at at the moment. I don't want to see proofs of stuff, I just want to furnish my mind with mathematical constructs. It has the right level of explanation and examples, with a few questions in case I want to dig a bit further. And it's free. 🤯 Secondly I was trying out ChatGPT with some maths questions. My experience of Google search results AI, which is the only AI I regularly use, is that it's unhelpful and sometimes completely wrong. ChatGPT has been useful on the odd occasion. I tried out its maths knowlege. When I asked it a factual question it seemed to get (according to my comparison with the §1.6 of Napkin) the right answer. I guess because the internet is full of concise and true statements about maths it's highly likely to get the answer right. Here's wha...